


Puzzle

by we_built_the_shadows_here



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Dark, Alternate Universe - Voldemort Wins, BAMF Lily Evans Potter, Dark, Dead Harry, Dead James, F/M, First War with Voldemort, Gen, Horcrux Hunting, Horcruxes, Lily Evans Potter & Severus Snape Friendship, Lily Evans Potter Lives, Lily Lives, Memory Loss, Not A Fix-It, POV Lily Evans Potter, Present Tense, Severus Snape may love her but that doesn't make him good, Slow Burn, cruel Lily Potter, hand-holding as a form of revenge, i am not here to make anyone happy, i live for angst, in fact that might make it worse, manipulative lily potter, more like break it in a new and different way, sharp left at the sign of canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-26
Updated: 2018-04-21
Packaged: 2018-12-07 11:08:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 46
Words: 143,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11622306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/we_built_the_shadows_here/pseuds/we_built_the_shadows_here
Summary: Three years after Voldemort visited Godric’s Hollow, Lily now lives under the protection of loyal Death Eater Severus Snape in a world ruled by the Dark Lord’s conquest.But the Order of the Phoenix is not completely eradicated, and two names are beginning to return to her: Harry and James.





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [【翻译】Puzzle 谜](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14169477) by [Septima727](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Septima727/pseuds/Septima727)



Lily feels like a half-finished puzzle.

Some days she tries to put the parts she’s got together.  Some days, she almost feels like she’s got it, she’s found all the missing pieces, and she’s ready to find the places they go in, but they never quite fit.  It’s never long before she loses them again, before something breaks her concentration and it’s all lost, all so many little meaningless words that don’t fit or connect anywhere.

She clings to what she has anyway.  The last time she thought she remembered something important, it was just a name, but it seemed the most important name she had ever heard, it seemed so important, like someone had screamed it three streets away and the wind had carried it here.  She stole a scrap of parchment and a quill and wrote it down.  She hadn’t held a quill in so long that it shook, and her handwriting was large and messy, like a child’s.  It was just five letters:

_Harry._

And then, later, when she remembered something else, another five letters, strung together, it seems, almost by chance:

_James._

Most of the time they don’t mean anything.  But sometimes, when she is alone in her room--no matter how full of flowers it is, no matter how beautiful and constantly in bloom they are--she pulls the bit of parchment out from the slit in the seam of her dress and reads the names.  Mouths them.  Memorizes them.  And something tugs deep down inside her, and she finds her face wet, and she knows that she has done something wrong, something very bad and wrong, but she can’t remember what.  She rolls up the parchment tight and hides it in the lining of her shoes, to be discovered again and again and memorized again and again, and--

There are footsteps.  He’s coming.  She scrubs her face and sleeve on her robes and tries to look bright and cheerful--he hates to see her sad--and she finishes the bouquet she is arranging on the dining room table.

The front door opens.  It is storming outside, and the wind is ghastly.  “Lily?”

“In here,” she says.  The cold air is already creeping around her bare feet, but she hears the door shut and lock, and footsteps.  He fills the doorway like a spider fills a corner, suddenly, almost all web and no weight to him, shaking snow from his cloak.  He pushes his hood back and shrugs the thing off.  She takes it from him.  Snowflakes melt into her palms like the tiniest, newest ocean.

His hand on her shoulder is cold from outside, and it’s shocking that anyone can feel so cold and still be alive.  It makes her start.  But he’s her best friend, she chides herself, and he’s so gentle with her, and he takes care of her ever since--

His lips are so cold on her forehead that she might be being kissed by a corpse.  But it feels good to have him home.

 _Home._ Harry.  James.  Like thinking in another language, one she learned as a child and hadn’t spoken in years.

She shakes her head again, and smiles up brightly.  “How was your day, Sev?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here are some things I need to let you know:
> 
> 1\. I started this fic in 2011.  
> 1b. I abandoned this fic in 2011 (maybe 2012?) and have picked it back up in 2017.  
> 1c. I have committed to a chapter-a-week update schedule until it is finished. Look at the update times as receipts and feel free to berate me if more than a week has past.  
> 1d. No, seriously. Berate me. I've kept consistent with the schedule so far but lord knows I'm fallible.
> 
> 2\. I have improved as a writer since 2011 and, admittedly, this thing takes a minute to get going. Please bear with it. I'm actually very proud of my writing, later on. There will be another comment at the endnotes when the 2011 segment ends.  
> 2b. I don't currently plan to update the first few chapters because I would rather move forward than backward.  
> 2c. I welcome any feedback on these early chapters to help me if I do decide to go backward and edit.
> 
> 3\. Please--PLEASE!--leave comments. Tell me what you love. Tell me what you hate. Tell me how you feel. The only way I know I have succeeded if I have made you feel something. The only way I know I have failed is if you stay silent. So please let me know.
> 
> 4\. Sorry.


	2. The First Piece

After dinner, someone arrives.  When someone else is there, she has to act the servant.  “I’m sorry,” he always says, before and after, and she smiles up at him, and he seems to take that as acceptance of his apology enough.  She puts on a clean white apron and folds her hands and keeps her eyes on the floor.

The guest steps out of the hearth, shaking soot off, followed by a huge black dog.

“Regulus,” Severus says, and suddenly his spine is straight and his eyes are unreadable, and he looks terrifying, tall and angular, more architecture than man, as far removed from the skinny mismatched boy she met on the playground as anyone could be, and playing the cowed servant isn’t so hard as it might have been.

Lily thinks about the playground.  Petunia.  Whatever happened to Petunia?

The guest looks around.  “Settling into the new house nicely, I see.”

She takes the sooty cloak as he shucks it off and hangs it, brushing it off as she moves.  It’s so soft she wants to keep touching it, but she knows she shouldn’t.  She moves toward the kitchen to make tea for them both.

The dog’s eyes follow her across the room.  She feels it, the animal’s focus hot as blazing hearth.

“Ah.  It likes the mudblood,” Regulus observes, amused.  “Like attracted to like, I suppose.  Go on, then.”

She doesn’t look at Severus’ face, but out of the corner of her eyes, she sees his hand tighten white around the doorknob for just an instant, and then relax.  Regulus pats the dog and looks up at her, his expression colder than it was for the animal. “Feed him something.”

Lily doesn’t meet his eyes but nods, curtsies, and leaves, and the dog follows, as if it understands.  She can hear the clicking of the dog’s claws behind her and knows it is watching her, watching her bare feet on the cold stone steps (slaves aren’t allowed shoes, of course, no matter how cold the house is), watching her descend.

She enters the kitchen and turns on the light.  The house has electricity; thank Severus for that as well, because keeping a house this big and empty without a wand or electricity is abominably difficult.  She turns to the sitting dog.

She remembers being Head Girl, giving orders to First Years.  The memory puffs her full of breath.  “Stay.”

It tilts its head.  It’s eyes are huge and golden and a little sad, but it sits and doesn’t move.

She turns her back and puts the kettle on, and goes to the icechest--another thing to thank Severus for--and searches for a plate of leftover roast beef.  She closes the door and reaches for a carving knife--

A filthy hand--almost a claw--closes around her upper arm, and the plate clatters loudly to the floor.  Another hand claps across her mouth before she can scream.  The dog is gone, and the man before her is filthy, wearing clothes at least ten years old, and he’s whispering something--she bites his hand and squirms, she tastes his coppery blood, but he doesn’t budge, his teeth are bared, and his eyes are golden hazel and fixed on hers, and she tries to struggle and scream but he is stronger--and finally he realizes his hoarse whisper is making her name--

“Lily!  Lily, it’s me--it’s Sirius--it’s me, Lily, it’s me!”

She stops struggling for a moment and his grip relaxes.  She tries again to wrench herself free and make a mad dash for the door but he catches her with both hands, shoulder and hair, and swings her around into the counter, pressing her there like a lover, pinning her arms.

“Stop it, Lily, stop it, please, I don’t want to hurt you, it’s just me--”

“Get your hands off me!” she hisses.  “I don’t know how you treat servants in your home but Severus will be very angry if he finds out you’re manhandling me.”

“What has he done to you?”  The horror in his eyes gives her pause.

The kettle is whistling a low, low song, but he won’t let her go.  “What has  _ who _ done to me?”   
  


“Snape,” he spits, as if its a curse.   
  


“I’ll ask you not to speak of him like that,” she says stiffly, and wrenches her shoulder free.  The kettle is screaming now, but she doesn’t move to touch it.  “Didn’t I go to school with you?  Aren’t you one of the Blacks?”

“I’m--”  He pushes his shaggy hair out of his face, rolling his eyes wildly, casting about for something in her face, some recognition, anything.  “Merlin’s beard, Lily, I was the best man at your wedding.”

“I’ve never been married.”

The transformation from exasperation to defeat, watching this man deflate, is satisfying, but also disturbing.  “Yes,” he snaps.  “You have.”

“I think I would remember that.”

“It was--before.  Before the war.”  His eyes narrowed.  “Before you-know-who took over.”  He searches her face hungrily, but seems to come up empty.

She finds the courage she’s been trying to pull up around her middle, and turns her back on him and pours the tea into the teapot, setting out the teacups and cream on a tray.

“You don’t remember any of it, do you?”

She takes out a polishing cloth and gives two of the teaspoons a quick buffing, and then places them next to the saucers.

“Please try to remember.”  There’s a begging note in his voice now, and she wishes desperately that she had the ability to detect a lie like Severus has.

“Severus has been my best friend since--since before I went to Hogwarts.  He protects me.  I get a bit--off, sometimes.  Since the accident.”

The man makes a sound of disbelief.  “Accident.  Is that what the prat calls it?  When he kidnapped you from your home just before the Dark Lord--”

She’s not sure how the knife got into her hand, but she whirls on the man and presses it close, between his ribs.  “Give me a reason, dog.”

His eyes are huge, his hands up, helpless.  His voice comes fast and low.  “Lily, I know how they treat--how they treat muggle-borns.  I can get you out of here.  I can keep you safe from him.  We’ve got safe-houses, places you can stay and never see him again--”

She digs the point of the carving knife closer.  “Why would I betray Severus like that?”

“Because he’s the reason!” the man hisses.  He looks mad, for a moment, demented with grief and hatred.  “Because he’s the reason James and Harry are dead!”

She doesn’t drop the knife, but she pulls it away from his ribs.

“You remember, don’t you?  James and Harry?”   
  


“They’re just names.”  She closes her eyes and moves her head slowly, side to side, trying to shake them loose.

“They’re your husband.  Your son.”

“I’ve never been married,” Lily says, but it tastes like a lie now.  “They’re just names that rattle around--”   
  


But Sirius is looking up to the door.  “They’ll want their tea, I expect.  Listen.”  She opens her mouth again, but he grabs her wrists, twisting the knife past his face, and leans closer, speaking low and fast.  “No.  Just listen.  You still remember how to do magic, right?”

“Of course I do,” she snarls. 

“Good.  Reg and I are working together, trying to bring things down from the inside.  Snape is the lynchpin--if we can get him under the Imperius curse, or feed him some Veritaserum, we might really get somewhere.  You need to take his wand from him, either get him under control or knock him out or--anything.  When you do, Floo us, ask for Padfoot, we can take it from there.”

“Take his--why?”

Sirius rolls his eyes again.  “Because you think he’ll just submit to the Curse, do you?  Or that he cares about the plight of muggleborns and muggles?”

“What are you talking about?”

“You having to play servant!” he hisses frantically.  “Maybe Snape even treats you all right, maybe, but do you know what goes on out there, to the other muggleborns?  Have you even left the house in the last three years?”

“Not really.  It’s not safe.”

Sirius is shocked enough to let go of her, and she puts the knife down on the counter, next to the tray.  Its tip is red.

“Muggleborns are slaves for high-ranking Death Eaters.  Muggles are being killed like cattle.  All across Europe.  Beauxbatons still stands, but Durmstrang has fallen, and so has Hogwarts.”

Lily shakes her head.  “Severus keeps me safe.”   
  


Sirius takes a step back and regards her coldly.  “And how do you pay for that safety, then.”

Lily does not understand, or maybe she doesn’t want to.  “Pay for--”

“Maybe you didn’t notice how he was after you ditched him at the end of fifth year, but I did.  Stared after you.  Watched you all the time.”  Sirius is savage, leaning close, his breath hot and awful on her.  “I know what he wanted.  Don’t think for an instant he’s keeping you safe out of the goodness of his  _ heart _ .  If he hasn’t done it yet, I imagine it’s only to wait for you to come to him of your own accord.  To really  _ win _ you from James.  Or maybe--maybe he’s already done it, and you just can’t remember.”

She almost picks up the knife again as she realizes what he’s implying.  “Never,” she hisses.  “He would never--”

“You’re already under one memory charm.  What’s another?” Sirius says loftily, moving to the door.

“You’re wrong.”  But it sours in her mouth, and her gut twists, and she looks away.  The sugar bowl trembles in her fingers, and when she looks back up, Sirius is regarding her with large, golden, canine eyes.  He snatches up a few bits of fallen roast and gulps them down off the floor, and she lifts the tea tray.  It’s heavier than it’s ever been.  The teacups rattle in their saucers.  It sounds like a hailstorm.  She puts it back down.  She takes a deep breath.  Clenches her fists, her teeth.  Her cheeks are wet again.  She hates this feeling, like she’s a rock skipping across her own memories instead of sinking into them.

When she picks up the tea tray again, it doesn’t shake at all.  The dog follows her out.


	3. Nightshade

_ Get his wand. _

That night, Sirius’ words hang with her in the air like fairy lights over her bed.  She doesn’t have to take out the parchment now.  She taps out the letters of each name-- _ Harry _ on the right and  _ James _ on the left--into her thighs, her ribs.  She taps the  _ e _ of James so often she feels something, some sign, some searing emptiness  _ must _ appear on her left ring finger.  There must be some better way to find the truth than betrayal.  She strokes the inside of her left ring finger with her thumb, as if to turn some invisible ring.

But if what Sirius said is true--it’s not coming.  There will be no sign.  It will just go on as it has if she does not change things.  And the dog knew the names.  He knew them like they were written out on her fingertips already, as if the ring were there.

And there was the other accusation, the one that is keeping her from sleep.

Severus doesn’t talk much about what things were like outside of the house.  But the way others--Mulciber and Yaxley and others--leer at her tells her what mudbloods are good for.  That the helplessness of a muggle woman might be nothing compared to the impotence of being capable of fighting back, of being capable of magic and yet denied the means.  She knows what they think Severus uses her for.  Getting her to play house-elf is just a perk, something to keep her busy while he is away.

She has to get up.  Lying here thinking will make her mad.  She stands, turns on the lights.  Though the room lacks windows--another safety measure--there are flowers everywhere.  Morning glories scale the bedpost with their throats turned to an unseen sun.  Snapdragons line the corners.  Honeysuckle dangles heavy tendrils from the corners and celling.  It’s an intricate bit of charm work.  She knows Severus did it himself--and that there are other curses around the door, curses that will only let them through, dissillusionment charms to hide its location, glamours to make it look like a dark, bare cell.  He has gone to such lengths to protect her.  No, that’s not quite true.  She plucks a morning glory bloom from the vine as she sits up and crumples it in her fist.  He’s gone to these lengths to  _ keep  _ her.  Like a bird in a bell-jar.

She sits at a desk and brushes her hair.  There are no mirrors in her room.  She wonders why.  Perhaps so she doesn’t see the spoils of war staring back at her.

There are two problems.  Firstly, a memory charm strong enough to block all that is probably too strong to break and leave her whole.  Simply breaking it is not quite an option.

The other problem is, Severus doesn’t ever let his wand go.  He keeps it up his sleeve or in an inside pocket of his cloak, and she doubts her ability to sneak into his bedroom and steal it while he sleeps without him waking.  He probably places protective spells, she thinks darkly.  There’s no way it could be so simple.  No, she will have to get his guard down.

Lily sits through the night and makes a plan.  It’s uncomplicated.  It answers each question without a shadow of a doubt.  She must simply do it.

This, she thinks when dawn finally comes, this is not the hard part.  The hard part will be what comes after.

\---

He is in his laboratory.  He makes a frustrated sound, and she touches his shoulder.  He starts.

“I could help,” she offers.

“You know I can’t let you.”  He rubs his temples for a moment, and Lily is struck by how drawn he looks, how old.  His birthday is coming; he will be twenty-three, but he looks as if he’s been left out in the rain, weathered like wood at sea, older than his years.  The light catches a single silver strand--like a memory--in his lank, dark hair as it falls around his face.

“Why is this so important?”

His mouth twists ruefully.  “The Dark Lord asks this task of me personally.”

“What is it?”

He moves his hand across his brow as if he wishes to wipe it clean or even, to smooth out the wrinkles of worry forming there.  “Please don’t concern yourself.”

But Lily is reading the parchment over his shoulder.  “It looks like a potion to make the victim vomit.  Specifically, something of a nightshade strain--but you’ve made changes, of course.”

Severus  purses his lips.  “You’re too clever for your own good.”

“For my own good,” she repeats back to him, mugging for him, a smile stretching her mouth wide.  “Who are we making sick up their lunch into the china today?  The Dark Lord suddenly developed a taste for pranks?”

He looks up at her, and something almost like a smile crinkles at the corners of his eyes, but it’s gone as soon as it passes over him.  “Beauxbatons,” he says, and his eyes won’t meet hers.  “They draw their water from an underground river that in turn draws from this river.”  He traces a thin blue line on a map before him.  “But it must be able to get through undetected by any of the protective enchantments.”

She is perfectly still.  She focuses on breathing.  Her thumb strokes the inside of her left ring finger.  “It’s not just going to make them ill, is it.”

His face hardens.  “It is none of your concern.”

“There are children in that school, Severus.  Eleven year old boys and girls.”

“I know.”  The defeat in his voice rings like a knell.  He rubs his knuckles in his eye sockets, and stands.  “You shouldn’t be in here.”

She looks down at the notebook again, and he snaps it shut.  He spreads his hand on the cover of it, as if to hide it, and she watches him straighten, draw himself up.

She walks to the door and opens it, but thinks better of it.  “Based on the charms you had listed, it should work.”  Lily doesn’t mean it as cruel as it comes out, but there’s an edge there, just the same.

His face may as well be a tombstone for all it tells her.  “I know.”

She thinks again of being Head Girl.  How strangely hazy the memory is, in parts, like a television with the volume turned way down.  But she remembers shepherding First Years.  She remembers how they looked at her, with huge, hopeful eyes.  How they might drink down water with the trust born of having never worried about death and how quickly it might come for them.

She shuts the door to the laboratory and drums out the names, quickly, together, on her elbows as she walks.

Tonight, then.  It must happen tonight.  It could have waited weeks--months--years, even.  Lily Evans has the capacity for endless patience when it comes to something this important.  But not now.  She hardens her heart, like she has before, against him.  He would charm her flowers and poison children.  She must act.


	4. A Plan Enacted

It is almost as if he’s expecting her.  He has shucked off his robe and the cuffs of his dress shirt are unbuttoned and rolled up.  She decided, after some thought, on borrowing his dressing gown--the black one with the snake around the sash.  The material makes her feel like she’s already completely nude, and she resists the urge to cover herself.  Something of what she is feeling must be showing in her face, because he watches her for a long moment before he speaks.

“What’s wrong?”

She opens her mouth, but what is there to say?  She moves to him, eyes fixed on his, solemn.  This is the plan.  It must be followed.  The only way to catch him with his guard down is to give him what he wants.  She knows what he really wants, now.

She puts both her hands on his chest.  He’s warm, almost flushed, and her hands move up, over his skin to his narrow shoulders.

“Lily--what’s wrong?”

It almost makes her stop.  It almost makes her want to apologize.  There is such concern there.  But she taps each finger on each hand out onto his shoulders, tapping each name into his skin like a question she can’t ask yet.

She folds herself into his chest, hanging her hands from his shoulder and tucking her face beneath his chin, and she can hear his heart pick up its pace, like a tiny drum inside of his chest, beating out her name.  How stupid she is, to have not heard it before, to have stood so close to him and not hear this tremendous sound.

His hands settle, carefully, lightly, on her back.  His wand is on the table next to his bed.  She could just lunge for it--but no, one failed attempt and all would be lost.  Better to be sure.  But she wonders, for just a split second, if she is telling herself that.  Days upon days of cleaning and moving and constant housework--and dodging cursed artifacts--have kept her strong and nimble.  And he’s so skinny.  Her fingers slide down his back.  He’s always been slim, but not like this.  She might even best him.  It doesn’t matter.  She loves him--she is his best friend--and her heart aches with how long it has been since she has been held like this, by someone who loves her.  She can’t remember how long it’s been.

No, she thinks, her brow drawing together again.  She can’t remember.  That’s the problem.

But when he asks for the third time, murmuring the words into her hair, she knows this is an impasse, that she--the plan--cannot move forward without answering this question, and that she is so stupid, she has nothing prepared for this.  She had simply thought of him as another enemy and dragging him here would take no convincing at all, just the offering up of blatant opportunity, but no--he’s not just an enemy.  He’s not Macnair or Rosier.  It’s Severus, and despite what she doesn’t know--despite how her memories get fuzzy starting around her seventh year of Hogwarts and only get fuzzier until Christmas of 1981--she knows that Severus could never just accept gift that came to him for no reason, no matter how badly he wanted it.  Severus always looked for what it would cost him.  Always.

Lily can’t think of anything to say, and he uses his hand to push her shoulders up and away from him, and her hands are wrapped around herself, and she knows he’ll know if she lies.  Whether through magic or simply knowing her face, he will know.  She must come close enough to the truth.  Her mouth opens.  She is not sure what will come out until it does.

“I’ve been so blind for so long.”

She shakes her head, and pushes away the hair that falls in her face.  She feels the grip on her shoulders slacken, and she steps back toward him and lifts her mouth like a sacrifice.  Her lips brush his cheek.  It is not quite a kiss, but it is an invitation.  He smells faintly of turpentine.  Even though he knows that she doesn’t mind scouring his cauldrons, and she doesn’t have anything else to do all day, he still scours most of them himself--and what must he have been brewing, to require turpentine--she remembers suddenly, vividly, the day in her seventh year, before the N.E.W.T.s, when they both got stuck tutoring O.W.L. students thanks to an oblivious Slughorn, how they had scoured their cauldrons in horrible, spiralling silence--she thinks of Beauxbatons, and wonders what else he’s hiding--

He turns his face toward her as if he is trying to listen, trying to catch more words on her breath.  His mouth is so close, lips parted.  She thinks of how they scoured their cauldrons together in steely silence, and then, how she had felt him watching her, and how it had felt then like accusation or hatred or even an outright attack on her breeding, now she sees it--the boy from years ago, staring back out at her, and she understands now how wrong she was.  It was never hatred, but something deeper, darker, more terrible.

And she has told the truth.  She has been blind to this.  It is sickening, thrilling, as the moment hangs there, but she understands that he will not move forward.  He will never move forward unless she drags him with her.

This is not the hard part, she reminds herself, and she leans into him, and their lips meet.

At first, he is not kissing her back, but she moves her hand to his neck, and his hands tighten around her suddenly, and he is kissing her back with a ferocity she has never known was in him. Her body feels lit up, like she has just been plugged into the wall.  And suddenly, this is not the hard part, no longer something to get through, or a necessary evil, or something to be endured with shut eyes and thoughts of England.

She tugs at the satin knotted around her middle and his hands travel up her back to tangle in her hair.  His other hand slides around her waist, thumbing her ribs, tracing their outline through her robe and skin.

She succeeds in undoing the knot, and the robe falls open.  Like wrapping paper, she thinks, and a tiny shiver goes through her.

But his mouth is gone, and she feels suddenly cold, and his hands are fumbling at her waist with the sash.  He isn’t looking at her.  He’s looking at his own hands on her waist, holding the dressing grown shut.

“No,” he says, and he sounds unsteady.  He swallows, and says it again, firmer this time.  “No.”

It stings.  This is only a plan, she reminds herself.  Get his wand.  It has nothing to do with her and everything to do with poison and children, but it stings still.

“Sev--”

But he doesn’t let her finish.  “I don’t know why you’re here--doing this.”

“Why do you think?” she says hotly, evading the lie.

“It doesn’t matter.”  He shakes his head.  “We can’t.”  And he takes a tiny step back, holding her shoulders at arm’s length.

She is holding the robe shut now, and unexpected tears prickle her eyes.  The words tumble out, messy and awful and true enough.  “I thought--I had hoped that you--felt this way.  About me.”

He doesn’t answer.  He smooths her hair back from her face, and for just a moment, he parts his lips, and it seems like he’s going to say something, anything, he is going to confess it all, and she won’t have to betray him--but he doesn’t.  He just looks into her like there’s something there only he can see.  And his eyes move to her left hand holding the robe tight across her throat, lingering, perhaps, where a wedding band might go.

Her heart turns to stone.  It’s almost as good as a confession.

\--Almost.  She would still like to hear the confession.

He lets her go and walks toward the master bath, saying something about draught of dreamless sleep, and the wand is so close, the tears are still prickling her eyes and she feels the hot flush of shame suffusing her ears and cheeks and chest, and the wand is so close, and he looked for the ring as she has, he knows, it must be all true, and the wand is so close--she lunges for it.

When he emerges from the master bath, holding a small phial, it’s pointed squarely at his chest.  The wand tip doesn’t even waver.

“Harry.  James.”

It feels so good to say them out loud, to Severus, she wants to scream the names.  But the wand tip begins to shake, and she knows she must focus.  Severus is dangerous.  Think of what he must have done.  Think of what he could do.

“I know I’m under a memory charm.  A strong one.  Probably too strong to break and keep me sane.  But I want to know what it’s hiding.  Harry.  James.”

He seems to sag, as if all the air is going out of him.

“Tell me what happened to them.”

Severus casts about the room, but returns to her eyes.  “You married James Potter.  You had a child, Harry.  A prophecy was made--that Harry would be the one who could defeat the Dark Lord.  I prophecy that I overheard.”  His hand is huge, spidery on his chest.  His voice has a low note of resignation, and deeper still, a rehearsed tone, as if he has said these words in a mirror many times to make sure they would come out correctly, as if he had known that someday this would be forced out of him.  He sets down the phial.

Lily keeps breathing.  This is not the hard part, she reminds herself.  This was never going to be the hard part.

“When the Dark Lord decided to kill your son, I went to Dumbledore and asked him to protect you.  The Fidelius charm was done, but Peter Pettigrew was your secret-keeper, and he betrayed you.”  He looks away from her, and something moves over him like a shadow, and his mouth becomes a narrow, hard line.  “I got the secret out of him myself and took you away before he arrived.  I barely managed to cover the whole thing up.  Claimed Pettigrew was playing a part in a larger scheme of the Order’s.  Laying a trap.  A trap I disabled.”  His smile is wan, bitter, and he gestures around.  “That lie bought this house.  The Dark Lord extracted--”  He shakes his head.  “People will confess to anything under torture.”

Lily wonders what Severus must have done to Peter--what horrors must the trembling wand in her hand must have seen--to transform him like this.  He could meet her eyes when he spoke of working for the Dark Lord, but not when speaking of this.  She wants to cast the wand away, to stop him speaking.  These are the answers, she reminds herself.  This is what you wanted.

“I went with you?” she asks, incredulous.

“Not willingly,” he mutters.  “I had to Stun you.”  He speaks to the snake on the sash at her waist with its single, glinting pearl eye.  “When you woke, it was over.  They were gone.  You were so angry--but you were alive.”  He shakes his head and takes a step toward her.  “The Ministry fell within the month, and they started rounding all the muggle-borns up, catching them and imprisoning them if they ran.  I said I had captured you.  I asked to-- _ keep _ you.”  His mouth twisted again, an ugly expression moving across his face.  “They say it’s a form of employment, rehabilitation, but naturally it’s less than that.  All they need to do is find anther muggle-born when the one they’ve got wears out--you have no idea how many women Macnair has gone through, these past years--he keeps their heads, like the Blacks preserve house-elves--”   
  


“Stop it.”  Lily shakes her head and grits her teeth.  “I know what I’m good for, all right?”

He stops pacing and looks at her for a moment that seems to stretch forever.  “I couldn’t let that happen to you.”

“And everyone else, then?  Everyone else can rot?  Like my husband and my child?”  She does not like how shrill her voice is becoming, but she can’t contain it.  It’s like a scream is fighting its way out underneath and between the words.  “Or do you think they don’t matter because you made me forget them?”   
  


“You agreed to it!” he shouts, and his face is flushed suddenly with fury.  “It was killing you!”

The wand-tip falters.  His hand passes across his eyes again, as if he’s trying to draw the memory out.

“You wouldn’t eat.  I had to keep you out of the kitchen, away from all the knives.  You broke the mirror in your room and tried to--”  He shook his head.  “I asked you if you wanted to live.  If you wanted to forget.  You said yes.”

She mouths the syllable.   _ Yes. _  It feels strange in her mouth, like a foreign word.

“I couldn’t stand to watch you suffer.  I did the memory charm so you wouldn’t have to live with it.”

“And you?”

His mouth is a hard, thin line, and he meets her eyes, finally.  “I live with it.”

It falls into place, then.  Sirius was wrong.

“I started--remembering their names,” she murmurs.  She drops the wand to her side, puts it down on the table next to her.  She holds up both hands, palms out, and says each name again.  Sinking into the bed, she rests her hands on her knees.  “Just the names.  Didn’t know who they were.”  She rubs her abdomen absently.  “I had a son.”

He moves next to her, but doesn’t go for the wand.  He sinks into the bed next to her.

“You were always better at charms than me.  And the bigger the memory charm, the more likely it is to break down.  It could come back.  If the names are coming back, it might break down entirely, come back to you in parts without destroying--”

She laughs humorlessly.  “Parts.  I’m in bits and pieces.”

The silence stretches on, and she can hear him breathing next to her, his eyes on her hands.

She swallows.  “I want my wand back.  And my ring.”  When she looks up at him, he is still watching her hands.

He nods, stands, and moves to the bookcase.  He removes a large volume and opens it.  Inside are a few things, but her willow wand--so small inside the huge book--and she can’t hold in the tears any longer.  He removes a ringbox, and offers it first, but she shakes her head.

“My wand,” she breathes, and he extends it toward her, hilt-first.

She lifts it from his fingers and sparks, violet and brilliant, illuminate Severus’ face from below and drift slowly to the floor.  The light makes him look even colder, and it makes his face look hollow.

“I’ve wanted it back for so long and now I can’t even think of something to do with it,” she breathes.  Her thumbs go under her eyes to wipe away whatever is welling there.  She opens the ring box.  The slim gold band that sits there next to a rather large diamond, glittering like a single, watchful eye.  She takes them out, slips them on her finger, but they look wrong there.  She rotates them, trying to make them feel comfortable, but then finally takes them off and puts them back in the box.  “I couldn’t wear them around anyway.  Someone would notice.”  She offers the ringbox back to him, and he takes it, eyes searching her face.

He turns his back to her and puts the ring box back into the book, and replaces it carefully on the shelf.  “And now?”

She stands, strokes the length of her wand with one finger.  “It depends on what you mean to do to Beauxbatons.”

He looks weary, again, and worse--defeated.  He shakes his head.  “I’ve had the poison worked out for months, hoping they’d scale up their defenses.  He’s getting impatient.  I can’t delay it much longer.  I’ll have to brew it and give it to him.”

She rotates the wand in her hands, and then drops it in the pocket of the dressing gown.  “Is that what you do, now?”

He looks at her, then rises, moving to a side-table.  He removes a bottle from a cabinet, pours himself something--it smells like port, old and sweet and rich--and offers a glass to her.  His eyes are hooded, dark, his face still and cold.  “I do a number of things for the Dark Lord.  Creating new poisons is among them.”

“But wasn’t it always like this?” she protests, taking the glass but not sipping it.  “This was always part of his plan.  You knew that when you joined up.”

“I was a fool,” he snaps.  He pours a glass for himself, and takes a sip.  It seems to steady him.

“How did he--get you?”

He swirls the glass, and looks into it.  “Power.  Respect.  I was a transparent child.  But once you take the Mark there’s no way out, and Bellatrix--” he spits the name with contempt-- “takes you in the night to practice the various Unforgivable curses on the vagrants living near the river near Spinner’s End--”  He breaks off, takes another sip rather more vigorously than is necessary, and sets the glass down so hard it shatters.

Before she thinks, she is at his side, and whispers, “ _ Reparo.” _  And it goes back together, the cracks sealing in tiny fissues of the dark red liquid.  The glass looks veined now, as if it has come to some sort of horrible life.  It sits in a puddle of wine.

She is grinning, giddy with the rush of magic for the first time in years.  She looks at him.  He’s staring at the glass.  “Sorry.  I suppose I’ve ruined the glass.”

He shakes his head, pinches his brow.

She looks into the puddle and sets her own glass next to it.  “There is--there’s another option,” she says slowly.  “For Beauxbatons.”

“If we run, he’ll find us.”

“No.”  She shakes her head.  “We wouldn’t have to.  If you change the proportions--let me tamper with the nightshade--”

“No.  If it’s obvious, he’ll know it was us.”   
  


“Us,” she says.  It’s not quite a question.

He inclines his head ever so slightly, but watches her hands still.  Her left hand, she realizes.  Her ring finger.

“I haven’t been out of the house in years,” she says.  “What’s it really like out there?  For people like me?”

“If you want to leave, I won’t keep you here.”  He leans away from her, defiant and angry.

She should be used to this.  It’s Severus.  He could never answer straight if he had to opportunity to be surly.  “I’ll leave when you chuck me out, and not before,” she says evenly.

He makes a disgruntled noise and appears very interested in his own crossed arms.  “I would never--”

“You haven’t heard what I want to do yet.  You might change your mind.”

He looks mutinous.  “Tell me, then.”

“I want to destroy him.”

There is never a question anymore who an unspecified  _ him _ might refer to.  It can be no one else.

Severus flinches, but recovers admirably with a retort.  “How do you suggest we go about doing that?  Ask him politely to resign?  Point our wands at a map of the Continent and shout  _ reparo? _ ”

_ We _ again, she notes.  And  _ our. _  Her smile widens.  “No.  But there is a resistance.”

“If you mean the Order of the Phoenix, I can assure you all of its members are dead, under the Imperius curse--or, in the case of Alastor Moody, tortured into madness and on public display in the Ministry.”  He glances at her and holds her gaze.  His eyes are hooded, unreadable, his voice cold, his body perfectly still.  “I believe he has most recently taken to flinging his feces at anyone who lingers too long at his cage.”

Her smile falters.  “Good lord.”

“If I took you out there, you wouldn’t recognize it.”

Anger blazes suddenly inside of her.  “And what are we supposed to do, then?  Walk about like mice and pretend everything is all right?  Poison children?”

“I have kept the both of us alive and well for three years,” he snarls.  “I will continue.”

Before she can stop the word, she spits, “Coward.”

The word makes him convulse, like he is being shaken out of paralysis.  For a moment, he almost looks as if he might strike her.  When he speaks, though, his voice is low, dangerous, trembling with anger.  “You have no idea the things I have done to keep you safe.”

“Is that the choice, then?  My life and your life over the lives of thousands of others?”

“It’s not your choice to make.”

“Then how are you any different than any of them?” she shouts, gesturing to the door.  “What--your reasons for doing what you do are nobler?  You’re willing to kill in the name of keeping us safe instead of in cold blood?  Do you think  _ he _ cares about the difference so long as you obey his command?”

He seizes her shoulder.  He is flushed, bright pink patches flooding his cheeks with color, his eyes wide and full of fire.  His teeth are bared--but it’s not inhuman.  He’s so human in this moment, it terrifies her.  “You come to me--like this--trying to fool me, steal my wand, confront me with accusation after accusation--” he shakes her-- “I have done nothing but show you kindness and safety, and  _ this-- _ ” he throws her from him, and she stumbles back, still clutching her wand.  “Get out of my chambers.”

She points her wand at his face as soon as she recovers her feet and steps slowly backward, to the door, feeling her way with her heels.  Groping blindly, she searches for the knob, her face contorting with anger, searching for something, anything, a weapon that will dig deeper than a knife or the wand in her hand.  But she knows what he looks like now--and the resemblance is so striking she cannot stop herself snarling the most hurtful thing she can think of:

“Your father would be proud.”

Before he can close the distance between them, she has fled through the door and is running, sash fluttering behind her, locking and sealing doors as she passes through them to ensure he can’t follow.


	5. The Arrangement

“Get out of my laboratory.”

“No,” she replies waspishly, not looking up.  The root must be diced very fine to have its intended effect, and Lily isn’t going to slice off a finger to appease Severus’ snit.  After an hour pulling herself together in her room after fleeing his chambers, she had made a decision: she got dressed, took her wand, and began to brew in his laboratory.  Early morning light now streams through the window.  A cold cup of tea sits on the side table on top of a stack of parchment.  The topmost parchment is covered with her own handwriting, stained with previous attempts and tests done through the night.  But this attempt is going to work, and it is not going to be ruined or abandoned simply to appease  _ him. _

“It is not a request.”

“I’m not accustomed to taking orders from you.”  She prods the fire beneath the cauldron.  He’s nothing but a black speck in her peripheral vision.  “You don’t want me to leave just now anyway, the potion is at a particularly volatile stage.  If you insist on sulking here alone, I’m more than happy to leave you to it in quarter hour, but I won’t blow off the back half of the house just because you’re moody.”

He doesn’t say anything, which probably means he’s standing there and glaring at her--as if that would change anything--or perhaps even shaking with rage or some equally impotent emotion, and Lily doesn’t care.  She feels reckless.  She is free.  The knife neatly swipes all the diced root off her cutting board and into her hand, and from her hand into the cauldron, and she whips the wooden spoon through three swift clockwise revolutions before striking it twice on the cauldron’s edge as it turns from a light, transparent blue to deep brown.  Approximately the color of Severus’ eyes, really.

She looks up at him.

He looks awful.  Miserable.  He looks like a fifteen year old who has just called his best friend a mudblood, really.  It’s a look she remembers quite well.  She didn’t soften then, and she won’t now.

“If you wish me to get accustomed to taking orders from you, by all means, give the order again.  Maybe pull out your wand and wave it threateningly or something.  At least I’m no longer under the illusion that you won’t hurt me to get your way.  Maybe that new fear in me will render you more effective.”

He flinches from this truth.  “I did not intend--”

“What you  _ intended,” _ she interrupts, slapping the spoon down to the cutting board with a sharp clatter, “does not matter.  What you intended has never mattered, Severus.”

They glare at each other across the table, through the cauldron’s steam.  He’s so still and pale he might be a statue.  In contrast, the heat of her angry flush and her billowing breaths make her feel like living furnace.

She looks away first.  She picks up the knife, testing it with her thumb.  It is dulled with use.  The long sharpener points to Severus like a threat, and she rasps the edge of the knife along it slowly--not quite a threat, but a warning.

“You should have paid more attention in herbololgy,” she says finally, her tone measured.  “You’d know that there’s a way to make this poison nonlethal.  Easy.”

“He will test it,” he snaps.  “If it does not work--”

“Tell him your pet mudblood tampered with it, then.”

“Your life would be forfeit.”

“You say that as if it mattered.”

“It does.”  His anger is bringing him to life again.  His shoulder twitches, as if to draw his wand.  This, she knows--this is what she wants.  This is so much better than his unreachable, untouchable stillness.

“Prove it,” she challenges.  “Living here, unable to leave this home, knowing the world outside despises me--as if that were such a life.”

His jaw works.  He is chewing on it now, the truth.  He’s not stupid.  He has been a lot of things, but outright stupidity has never been among them.

“I’m going to do with with or without you.”  Maybe he doesn’t know it now, but it’s an offering.  If she didn’t care at all, she wouldn’t tell him anything.  She would just do it.  Consequences be damned.

His quiet movement lasts so long, he almost goes still again, but he makes a nasal sound and says, like it’s an insult, “Gryffindor.”

“Git.”

His arms cross before him, but his shoulders are lower, almost relaxed.  “Are you going to blow off the back half of my home now, or later?”

“Not at all, if I can help it.  Could you fetch me the bottles of nightshade tincture over there?  I want to keep an eye on this in case it gets cranky.”

It’s like a wall has come down.  He brings her the bottles--still slightly glowing with faintly violet light--and holds one up to his face to inspect it.  “You’ve done something to them.  A charm?”

“Sort of.”  She opens a bottle and dumps the contents through a cloth, straining out nightshade pieces.  “I made this tincture last night.  Enchanted the roots themselves.  If I’m right, the tincture should take on the enchantment and pass its properties on to the poison itself.”  She extends her hand, and he drops the bottle into it.  She opens it, gives it a sniff, and pours it with its companion into a small bowl.  “If you’d have paid attention in herbology, you’d know that nightshade takes on charms rather well.”

“It will still be a poison?”   
  


“Yes.”  The third bottle is strained, and--slipping on Severus’ too-large dragonhide gloves, because nightshade can have interesting reactions with flesh--she squeezes the last of the liquid from the cloth.

He raises an eyebrow.

She can’t help a smile of self-satisfaction.  “It’s brilliant, really,” she says.  “It’ll test precisely like it should.  If I’m as good as I think I am--and you know that I am--he won’t know a thing.”

He watches her work, adding the strained tincture and stirring vigorously again, counting seconds under her breath.  The potion clears suddenly, giving off blue sparks.  She skims off a brilliant blue foam from the top.  His focus on her movements--her hands--makes her feel warm around her cheeks and ears.

She extinguishes the fire beneath the cauldron and twirls her wand between two fingers, meeting his gaze again.

“It’s done.  It could probably use some filtration, but it’s done.  Would you like to test it?”

His eyebrows move upward ever so slightly.  “On what?”

She taps her wand against her mouth twice, pensively, and then points it at the spoon.  Slowly--she has not done this in a while and she has never been very good at transfiguration--ever so slowly, it becomes a mouse.  A wood-patterned mouse, but a mouse nonetheless.  With an eyedropper, she siphons off a bit of the clear poison, and holds the mouse steady against her chest.  It struggles against her grasp, refusing to open its mouth.

With a snort of frustration, she says, “Sev--can you--”   
  


“ _ Imperio.” _  The mouse falls still as death.  There’s still fear in its tiny, dark eyes, but it’s at the bottom now, like a stone at the beneath the surface of a creek.  It opens its mouth.

It’s just a spoon, she reminds herself, and she places a drop in its mouth.  It swallows with only a slight tremble.

“It’ll take a while,” she says, stroking the mouse’s head with her thumb.  “Of course, you’d want it to take a while.  I estimate about two days with only minor symptoms.”

“And then?”

“Oh, the mouse will die.”  She conjures a tiny, delicate cage.  The mouse steps calmly inside and, when she shuts the door to the cage, Severus lifts the curse.  It scurries to and fro, an image of silent panic.  The smile born of magic and potion-making after so many empty years fades from her mouth.  She knows exactly how it feels.

“I assume you’ll like to know how it works,” she says, lifting the cage and setting it on a side-table, away from the fumes of the bench.

“I have a few ideas.  None of them will fool the Dark Lord.”  His voice is cool, but there was no disguising the interest there.

“It’s a handful of charms.  An identifying charm, and mental projection.  When you know what it is--you know what it is, and that’s that.  When you don’t know--you still know.”  She turns from Severus and empties the remainder of the poison in the eyedropper into a glass jar from the cabinet and, rummaging, brings down its identical mate.  With her wand, she fills both with water and turns back to him, holding the identical jars, each full of clear liquid.  “Here.  Tell me which has the poison.”

He inspects at the jars, and then, without moving, says, “The one in your right hand.”

“You see?”  She sips from the one in her left.  “The rest of it’s your recipe.  The addition of St John’s Wort is rather elegant, I wouldn’t have thought of it but it should stave off the worst of the effects til it’s too late to be treated.  I took the liberty of looking at your notes--you should have better security, by the way, if you actually intend to keep anyone with a wand out of them.”

“I did not intend to keep anyone with a wand out of them.  Just those--without.”

She raised an eyebrow.  “Me?”

He doesn't say anything, but his mouth thins and eyebrows twitch, as if to say,  _ who else is there? _

The disgust twists across her face only briefly, but she decides to take a page out of his book.  “I’ve decided things are different now,” she said coolly, regarding him through lowered eyelashes.  “You know what I want to accomplish.”

“And if I wish to stop you?”  His stillness holds only the smallest menace, but she knows how fast he is, how he can change immediately to someone else.  He’s always been swift, despite his other faults as a duelist and a man.

She watches him, her grip on her wand suddenly tight.  Her voice is low.  “I’m not the empty-headed girl you ask me to be when your  _ colleagues _ come by.  I can defend myself.”

The silence between them is no longer jovial.  It is thick, electric, neither looking away.

Her voice is low, almost begging when she speaks.  “I don’t want to fight you.  I want you to do the right thing.”  She swallows.  “I hope doesn’t come to violence between us,” she says finally.

He inclines his head.  It is the first time he has moved in what feels like a century. “As do I.”

“And the rest?”

He purses his lips, but nods slowly.

“I want to hear you say it.”

It looks as if he is about to say something else, but he nods.  “I will help you.”


	6. Joining Forces

The Floo powder makes the fire turn brilliant emerald, and Lily sticks her head in.  “Padfoot,” she says, and the universe swirls around her.  She is tired--she has not slept since their argument, and it’s evening now--but this meeting is important, and it cannot happen soon enough.  It is bad enough that it had to wait till this evening, when Severus ran his errand for more ingredients to mass-produce the poison, and no matter how much she wishes she could sleep, she must persevere.

The emerald flames bring her to rest in an expansive and beautifully appointed room.  Regulus sits at a desk across the room, and the huge black dog--Sirius--sleeps on the dishevelled bed.

Lily coughs, and both start.  Sirius comes to her first, transforming as he comes such that he is fully human when he comes to the hearth.

“Don’t, what if someone comes in?” Regulus hisses to him as he approaches, but Sirius waves him off.

“Have you done it?” Sirius asks, his sallow face brilliant with excitement.

“Is this hearth secure?”

“Yes,” Regulus says.

“Have you done it?” Sirius hisses again, looking starved for good news.

“I’ve done better.  Come through and see.”

The brothers looked at one another.  Lily withdraws her head, and, after a minute’s pause, a dog and Regulus stepped through the hearth.

Instead of looking at the carpet and curtsying, she smiles at the dog and pats his head.  He lets out a whine.

“I’ll call Severus.”  Pulling out her wand with a flourish that raised Regulus’ eyebrows and made the dog wag its tail furiously, she sends a brilliant patronus galloping along toward him through the open door at the other end of the room.  He just got back a minute ago, she heard the door open and shut; he should be done putting away the potion ingredients by now.  It’s thoroughly unnecessary, but it makes her point quite well.

Regulus is holding his sooty cloak at the end of an arm extended toward her.  Reflexively, Lily takes it and shakes it free of soot, hanging it on the rack.  Regulus settles himself into a chair.

“So, what is it you’ve done?” Regulus asks.

“I’ve convinced him.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I have my wand, don’t I?”

The dog paces before the hearth in a remarkably human way.  Even his head turns when Severus steps over the threshold of the doorway.

Severus takes a moment to get his bearings, and assumes the mask he always uses for Death Eaters.  “Regulus.”

Regulus fumbles for only a moment, and then gets to his feet and inclines his head.  “Severus.”

“Oh, quit it,” Lily snaps.  She points to Regulus and Sirius.  “They’ve been running resistance and helping Muggleborns for a while now.”  She points to Severus.  “He’s agreed to help you.”

The grandfather clock in the corner ticks away sixteen solid seconds before anyone moves.

“It’s been you?” Severus says slowly.

“Your servant’s gone mad.”  It’s obvious he’s scrambling, that he doesn’t quite trust her, not nearly enough for this.

She rounds on Severus.  “Were you lying earlier?  Are you going to help us or not?”

For a moment, he flinches, but he watches her face and then turns to Regulus.  The word  _ us _ seems to ring in the air.  “I am going to help her.”

Regulus stays still as more seconds tick away.

Lily is tired of this game already.  “Show yourself,” she commands Sirius, pointing a finger at him.  “I’m tired and I want to get these games over with as fast as possible.”

The dog whuffs once.

“Tell me in people words or don’t waste your time, dog-breath,” she snaps.

A slightly sheepish Sirius emerges from the carpet and stands.  “What I meant was that I forgot how bossy you are, Lily.”

“Good to know it’s not a quality that’s gone off with age,” she says.

Severus is looking at Sirius with a look of disgust.  “You were supposed to be dead.”

“And you were supposed to have dissolved into a puddle of your own grease by now, but we can’t always get want we want, can we, Snape?”

The disgust turns to loathing on Severus’ face, and his dark wand is pointing to Sirius when Lily steps between them.

“I’m sure we’re all very impressed with each other and I’m sure this could turn into a very entertaining and unproductive duel,” she says, looking between the pair.  “But if you two insist on quarrelling like school children, I will hex both of you until you stop.”

A triumphant smile breaks like a wave across Sirius’ face.  “Go for boils on his--”

“If you think I’m on your side in this argument, you will find yourself very mistaken.”

Sirius looks taken aback, and then motions to the man behind her.  At least Severus put his wand away.  “Lily--surely you don’t trust  _ him _ .”

“As a matter of fact, I do.”

“Why?”  Sirius smirks.  “Did he spin you a pretty lie about why you can’t remember your marriage to a man he loathed?”

“I believe what he told me, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“Yeah, and what did he tell you?”

“It’s none of your concern.”

“It bloody well is,” Sirius says, his ire rising.

Regulus puts his hand on Sirius’ shoulder.  “Enough,” he said coolly.

“We are going to work together, and you are going to behave yourselves.”  She shoots Severus a warning look over her shoulder and the faint smirk playing around his mouth dies.  “ _ Both _ of you.  We share a very important goal and arguing helps no one.”

“And what, pray tell, is that goal?” Regulus asks warily.

“To bring down the Dark Lord,” she says.

The two Death Eaters shudder slightly.

“That’s what I’ve been telling him,” Sirius grumbles, jerking his thumb at Regulus.

“It’s not so simple as either of you make it sound,” Regulus snaps, as if this is an argument they have had many times.

“Yes, it is,” Sirius continues, his voice rising.  “We hold onto our bollocks and do it.  What’s so hard about that?  Surely between you and Snape we can get through his security twice as easy, now.”

Regulus purses his lips and says nothing.  Lily looks at Severus and his unblinking eyes are on Regulus.  Severus’ dark eyes flick over to meet hers.  Understanding crackles between them.

“What aren’t you telling us, Regulus?” Lily asks.

Regulus looks mutinous.  “It’s one thing to help muggle-borns out of slavery.  It’s quite another to attempt to destroy the Dark Lord himself.”

“If you’re discovered doing that, you’re just as dead as you would be otherwise,” Lily says coolly, inspecting her nails but watching him beneath her eyelashes.

“This is different,” Regulus insists, putting his head in one hand and slumping back into the chair.

“Tell them, Reg,” Sirius says, almost pleading.  “In for a knut, in for a galleon.”

Regulus looks up at his brother for a moment, heaves a great sigh, and then says, “It’s a long story.  I should like a drink before I tell it.”  He looks expectantly at Lily.

“Sod off.  We’ve got plenty of wine, summon it yourself.  You’ve got a wand, haven’t you?”

Regulus, shocked, turns to Severus, who merely tilts his head toward her as if deferring to her authority.  Sirius is trying to hold back laughter and failing.

“Don’t look at him,” Lily snaps at Regulus, increasingly irritated with him.  “I’m not a house-elf.  I’m an equal partner in this venture now.  Hearing what you have to say is rather more important than fetching drinks..”

He looks irritated.  “I was trying to save you the trouble of hearing some ghastly truths.”

“I’m not a child either.”

He shrugs and flicks his wand.  Wine comes soaring through the open door, along with a glass.  With a tap of his wand, it begins uncorking itself.  Satisfied that he would have his drink regardless of her insolence, he begins, “The Dark Lord seeks dominion over all things.”

“That’s not news.”

He turns to her, looking cold.  “Are you going to interrupt me, or do you want to hear what I have to say?”

She purses her lips and gestures, welcoming him to continue.

“He seeks dominion,” he says, enunciating carefully, “Over all things.  Not just the country, or the world, or all its people.”  He looks pointedly at Lily, daring her to ask what else there could be.  When she does not interrupt, he continues.  “He seeks dominion also over death itself.”

Severus raises an eyebrow.  “There are a number of ways.  They all come with a high cost.”

Regulus looks only slightly less annoyed to be interrupted by a fellow Death Eater.  “And what cost do you think he’s willing to accept, then?” he snaps, irritated.

Severus looks up to the ceiling, thinking.  “Not the storage of memories--inelegant and incomplete, though the simplest--”

“Don’t think he hasn’t tried it,” Regulus says.

“But he won’t have stopped there.”

Sirius snorts.  “Of course not.”

Severus shoots Sirius a glare.  “If you have anything to contribute, kindly share your thoughts with us.”

Sirius rolls his eyes.  “Sod off, Snape.  I never went in for any of the Dark stuff, and you know that.”

Severus opens his mouth, ready to spit fire, Lily’s cuts across him.  “If you don’t know anything, Black, perhaps you should shut it and let those who do know talk.”

Regulus waits a moment, and Sirius doesn’t respond, glaring first at Severus and then at her.  Regulus turns back to Severus, and is blunt, as if he has had enough tiptoing around it.  “He has made horcruxes.”

Only Severus recoils.  “You’re sure?” he demands.

“He tested the protections for the horcrux on my own house-elf.  Let slip enough that, based on his retelling, I knew what it had to be.  He would protect nothing else so closely.”

Lily watches them exchange an inscrutable look.

“That’s not the worst of it,” Sirius adds.  “Reg thinks there’s more than one.”

“More than--”  Severus is momentarily thunderstruck, and the mocking tone is not present when he addresses Sirius.  “How many?”

Regulus responds, “We’ve been chasing them down for two years.  But--based on the artifact the house-elf saw, and from other probable ones we have identified and sought out--they will most likely be artifacts of magical and historical significance.”

“That does not narrow the field all that considerably,” Severus says dryly.

Regulus holds up a finger.  “It does.  He made them all before he truly took power.  Therefore, they would have been artifacts he had access to before his rise to power.”

“Who’s to say he hasn’t made more in the interim?” Lily interjects.

Both Regulus and Severus turn to her, as if they are both surprised to find her still in the room.  In their silence, Sirius picks up the slack.

“We don’t know.  But we suspect that he hasn’t because--well--convenience and vanity, mostly.  Convenience because the ceremony is complicated and horrible--”

“Like that would stop him,” Lily mutters, but Sirius continues on as if he hasn’t heard her.

“--and vanity, because how many artifacts can he possibly find that he thinks are worthy of housing a part of his soul?”

Lily’s eyebrows shoot up.  “That’s what it is, then?  A part of his soul?”

Sirius nods.

“And if he dies, these items will tie him to life?”

He nods again.

Lily considers this.  “How does one make a horcrux?”

The Black brothers exchange a look.  “Murder,” Regulus says.  Sirius is looking pointedly at the floor.

“That’s not surprising.”  Lily narrows her gaze at Sirius.  “What are you keeping from me.”

“Nothing,” Sirius says, too quickly.

Lily turns her steely gaze on Regulus.  If nothing else, he will tell her the truth out of less misplaced concern over her feelings.

“We think the Dark Lord has selected the deaths used to create these artifacts as carefully as he has selected the vessels themselves,” Regulus says carefully.

The clock ticks loudly, as if it is standing directly behind her and wants her to understand its meaning.  Her blood runs cold.

“My son,” she says flatly.  “His prophesied destroyer.”

It is to the young man’s credit that he holds her gaze steadily even when Sirius cannot and Severus has blanched pale as porcelain.  “We think so, yes,” Regulus says coolly.

“You think that will make it more difficult for me? To destroy the thing he made with my son's death?"

The silence hangs in the room like a noose.

Lily bites off her words with ferocity.  "It won't."


	7. The First Invitation

When Lily goes to sleep that night, she dreams vivid dreams full of battle, flashes of green light and running, always running, firing hexes over her shoulder, running but getting away and disapparating into twisting darkness.

It dissolves, and there is a face--messy dark hair and round glasses sliding down his nose.  His mouth is moving, he is saying something, and smiling, and then he is kissing her, and then--

She is aware she is dreaming.  She can feel her hands fisting in the sheets.  It doesn’t make the dreams any easier to bear.  She wakes up in a cold sweat.

The face is only somewhat familiar--it is the natural extrapolation of James Potter from the young man she knew at school into the man she had married.  He is older than she knew him at sixteen, his face hollowed by maturity, his jaw wider, and there is something in his eyes she can’t quite put her finger on.  But the dreams are just a series of pictures, just her mind replaying whatever old film reel it can dig up.  The person she is now has nothing to do with this ghost, but something stirs inside of her, as if someone else’s heart is breaking inside her chest.

When she wakes up, Lily relaxes her hands as best she can, rubbing at the back of her neck as if her chin had been tilted up to allow for the ghost of James to reach her throat.  She dresses quickly, pulling out old blue jeans and a t-shirt instead of the formal servant’s dresses she is normally forced into.

She steps into the kitchen, swinging the unvarnished wooden door open, and stops on the threshold.  Severus is already there, pouring himself a cup of tea.

Lily clears her throat.  “I could have done that, you know.  You could have woken me.”

He inclines his head.  “I could have.  But you made it quite clear that you’re no longer my servant.”

“That doesn’t mean you have to--what have you done?”  Something blackened seems to be seething with its own life in a pot on the stove.  She peers into it with apprehension.

Severus’ mouth twists.  “My cooking charms have never been very good, and I haven’t had much cause to practice them.”

“I don’t think I ever learned them.  I just do stuff the Muggle way.”  She flicks her wand and smiles into the now-empty pot, pleased with her Vanishing charm.  “I’ll show you a thing or two.  For this morning, I’ll play house-elf and you watch.”

It is unreasonable for anyone to have so much trouble with cooking eggs, but by the end, he’s managed not to break a yolk as he flips it.  It takes quite a while, eating his failed over-easy eggs as they continue to try.

“There’s got to be an easier way,” he finally mutters, piling the last of white and yolk both onto buttered toast as they sit over tea.

“I’m sure there is, but magically-cooked food always tastes a little strange.  You can just go--” she waves, emulating a wand, “bang, and turn an egg into this, but it’ll taste a little weird.  To me, anyway.  It’s always got a weird crackly taste, like how ozone smells.  That’s why you just enchant the knives to slice stuff up, or a spoon to stir, instead of just using the spell to turn ingredients into food.”

He shrugs and takes a sip of tea, and with his face half-hidden with the teacup, he asks, “I thought you said you never learned them.”

She tilts her head and chews, but there it is: to cook a piece of meat, it’s a circular motion, and  _ carnecium. _  The width of the circle described with the wand controls doneness.  How does she know this?  There’s a flash of an old woman with Potter’s nose smiling at her and moving her wand in a circle.  She swallows the bite.  “Interesting.  I guess I knew it before and it’s leaked through.  Now that I know what’s missing in my head, maybe the charm’s weakened.”

His eyes are on her face and sharp.  “Are you feeling all right?”

“I’m fine.”  She waves him away as he rises from the kitchen table and pulls his wand from his sleeve.  “I had a dream, I think it was memories.  Potter talking at me.  He looked older.”

Severus’ face crunches up for a second with dislike, but it relaxes back into a more usual frown.  “No pain?  No headaches?”

“Nothing.”  He looks like he doesn’t believe her, so she takes his hand and gives it a squeeze.  “If anything important comes through or hurts, I promise, you’ll be the first to know. ”

His brow unknits himself, and he holds onto her hand for a moment and then lets go, as if he’s just remembered he shouldn’t touch her.  “Good.”

“Don’t get all professor on me.  I saw that face, that’s your professor face.”

“I was only a professor for a few years,” he protests.

“Who’s at Hogwarts now, doing Potions?”

“Slughorn again,” Severus says, sitting back down and taking up his tea.

“Still?”

Severus takes a sip, as if he’s considering how much to tell her, but he relents.  “The Dark Lord has indicated to me that this post is as much so he can keep an eye on Slughorn as it is because of his teaching skills.”

Lily’s eyebrows shoot up.  “Why?”

Severus shrugs, his shoulders spiking up in his robes.  “It is possible that Slughorn taught the Dark Lord when he was a student.  His older supporters--Nott, Avery, perhaps Mulciber--I believe they knew him before he . . . took his title.”

She almost wants to tease him, to ask him to say the name, but she resists.  If he’s giving her information, she doesn’t want to jeopardize this openness.  Instead, she latches onto a different name.  “Mulciber?”

“Father to the one we know.”

“You knew.  I didn’t know him at all.”

He gives her an inscrutable look, but concedes the point.  “Fine.  Yes, the Mulciber that I knew.  The younger died in the war, but the senior is still living and serving.”

Lily takes this in.  “It might be worth talking to Slughorn, then.  He might be able to point us in the right direction for the horcruxes.”

He considers this.  “We will have to manufacture a reason to visit the school.”

“Easy.  The poison.  You’d want his advice, naturally.  He’d be flattered.  More so if you promised him some of the elf-made wine we’ve got in the cellar.”

He hesitates, but doesn’t speak.  She can read it clear enough, though.

“You hate the idea, don’t you?”

“It is risky.  If Slughorn is loyal--”

“Since when has old Sluggy ever been loyal to anything but his own preening ego?  He was my favorite teacher, but goodness, Severus, you act like he’s dangerous.  Don’t act like you and I can’t play the fat old man like a fiddle.”

He lets out a snort of almost-laughter.  “I suppose.”

“He can’t have changed that much, can he?  I’ve only seen him a few times since I graduated.  You would know better.”

“No, I think not.”

“Invite him over for supper.”

“He’ll be busy with classes.”

“Do you honestly think he’d turn us down?  His two star pupils?”

“You can’t think of it that way.”  He shakes his head.  “I’m his star pupil.  You’re a servant who’s lucky to be alive.  Even if he doesn’t want to treat you that way, he will, in front of me.”

“In front of any original Death Eater, you mean.”  But she nods along.  “No, I’ll play the part.”

He takes her hand across the table.  His fingertips are cool in her palm.  “I’m sorry.”

“You say that every time.”

“I’m sorry every time.”

“Don’t be.  We’re going to fix things instead of just being sorry for them.”

She didn’t mean the words to sting as they so clearly do, but he needs to know the truth, even if it hurts--particularly because it hurts, in fact.  He withdraws his hand, and, for lack of something better to do with it, she pulls out her wand and clears the table with a wave.  The dishes fly to the sink and begin dutifully scrubbing themselves.

“Floo him.  I’ll get in touch with the Blacks when you’re done.”  She opens the fridge and begins chewing her lip.  “I’ll start something for dinner now.  A ham, maybe, with pineapple rings.  He’d find that delightfully quirky, I think.”  He still looks a little hurt when she looks up from the fridge, but she beams at him, leaving it to hang open and putting her hands around his neck.  “Don’t look so glum.  We’re moving forward.  We’ve got ideas.  We’re gathering information. We can win.”

“Or we’re going to die horribly.”  But there’s no acid in it.

“Of course we’re going to die horribly.  What ever gave you the impression that I didn’t know that?”

\---

When Slughorn arrives, he looks around the house and Lily is there, smiling at his feet, curtsying, taking his coat.

“Ah, this house is as lovely as ever, Severus.”  In her peripheral vision, she can see Slughorn’s eyes linger on her, sweeping her body, looking for--what?  Bruises?  Bandages?  Scars?  To see if she looks starved or beaten?  She doesn’t dare look up--no servant of her birth trained as well as Severus must claim she is would ever have the gall to look  _ up _ unless ordered to--but her smile widens.  He finds nothing, naturally.  Lily knows that this only makes it worse in their minds; when a servant bears no signs on her skin, it’s only possible that the harm lies deeper.  They must think him such a monster, she thinks, hanging Slughorn’s coat.  Such a cold, heartless monster, to take his childhood friend and put her in the servant’s dress, to make such a cowed creature out of brazen, loud rebel Lily Potter.

The dinner moves smoothly, with Slughorn complementing Severus’ ridiculous but delightful choice of main course-- “Such cheek!” he exclaimed, and his eyes flicked over to her again, as if he knew, he must know that this was  _ her _ doing,  _ her  _ cheek,  _ her  _ cleverness.  And then there was his constantly filled glass of excellent elf-made wine.  They didn’t dare adulterate it; Slughorn is, for all his faults, a master potion-maker with a refined palate for wine.  He would be able to detect anything that would be potent enough to drag information out of him.  Wits alone would have to suss it out.  But it seems to be working.  The effects of old camaraderie and wine are making themselves evident in the flush in Slughorn’s cheeks and the breadth of his storytelling.  

Severus leads him up the steps to the laboratory.  When they’re out of range, Lily draws her wand from its hiding place up her sleeve, flicks it, and the dishes march obediently down to the kitchen to scrub themselves clean.  She creeps up to the door and listens, balancing a tray with more wine in one hand as a cover for her spying.

“--and Pollux Mulciber, being not the sharpest boy, you remember, adds the osmanthus and the whole thing went up in smoke!” Slughorn declares with a broad, ringing laugh.  Severus responds with the throaty noise, almost a cough, that passes in the stead of a laugh.  She recognizes it from a thousand times when she made a joke and it was too public for him to really laugh, or a thousand Slug Club parties where he had to feign interest in the stories of others.  It is familiar and strained and it broadens her smile to hear it, the familiar sound of his polite tolerance and indulgence for some reason other than his own entertainment.

“I have heard,” Severus broaches, “that you have not only taught Mulciber, but every member currently in the Dark Lord’s service.”

“Quite right!  Quite right.  The core group, naturally, I never saw those who went through Durmstrang or Beauxbatons, of course.”  Through the door, Lily can hear the  _ tink _ of an empty wine glass touching down on the bench.  She will have to enter soon, to keep him at least off-balance with wine, but she would not interrupt this crucial moment for Severus.  “Though none quite so brilliant as yourself, naturally.”

“There are rumors,” Severus continued, his tone still light, “that you taught the Dark Lord himself.”

There is a moment of silence, and then Slughorn, sounding flustered, says, “Well, that’s neither here nor there.”

“Surely you remember him?”

“Of course!” Slughorn exclaims, too quickly, as if to say he is remembered, perhaps, rather too well.

“And this?”  She cannot see it, but she imagines the broad, almost theatrical motion he might make to indicate the cooled poison in the cauldron, the arrogant and cold look he saves for fellow death eaters and strangers.

But Lily knows the silence is going on too long.  The hidden conversation is becoming more and more apparent, and Severus is pressing too hard.  Whatever he had done through the war, it must not have been this.  She was always much better at this kind of thing, of course, which shocked all four of the Marauders, and in the war she herself had been--

She stops the thought, and for a moment, she almost wants to scream in triumph.   _ The war.  _  She can remember--nothing distinct, just flashes, but there are raised eyebrows over grey eyes, and a gruff voice--the voice of Sirius, with that same familiar intonation he used when he first saw her--saying, “Merlin, Lily, remind me to never get on your bad side.”  And almost-familiar brown eyes glinting behind circular glasses, a knowing smile full of pride at her cleverness and bravery, a warm touch--

She wants to linger here, explore this sudden trapdoor.

She wants to so, so badly.

But there is work to be done, and Slughorn stalling within, and the game is almost up, so she lifts the tray of wine and puts the brown eyes aside, and opens the labaratory door.

Severus looks surprised and almost angry at her intrusion, but she carries the tray in with grace and sets it before them on the bench.  She makes a show of uncorking the bottle, pouring more wine into each goblet, saying, “Elf-made, 1945, sirs.  Special from the cellar on Master Snape’s request.”  She re-corks the bottle.

And carefully, purposefully, she looks directly at Slughorn, into his eyes perched like gleaming stones atop his flushed cheeks.  And then she turns to look at Severus’ dark eyes, with a small but brilliantly genuine smile.  “Sorry to interrupt.  I’ll leave you to it.”

As she exits silently, she knows there is nothing about it to truly give them away.  If the Dark Lord searches Slughorn’s mind and memories with whatever dark powers he has been rumored to possess, he will find nothing truly traitorous.  Enough to cast suspicion, perhaps, but not enough to cause anything momentous.  But this show, this display will allay Slughorn’s fears for her.  She can hear its effects even as she quietly shuts the door behind her and presses her ear again to the keyhole.

Tentatively, so quietly she can barely hear it, Slughorn asks, “Lily, is she--is she a good servant?”

Severus does not speak for a long moment, and then says, “The best.”

She doesn’t want to risk listening at the keyhole after that.  Really, she doesn’t need to.

Lily waits up for him in the kitchen, drinking her own glass of wine, poured from their bottle.  When he finally enters, well after midnight, he shuts the door behind him and she rises to her feet.  A rush of blood and alcohol rushes to her cheeks; he’s been away for so long that she, feels a little wobbly around the knees for it.  The wine loosened her muscles but hasn’t helped her spinning mind.

“Well?”

He purses his lips, as if he is loath to share anything.

“Don’t get that look with me.  I clinched it for you, didn’t I?”

Severus glances at the door again, as if he fears being overheard, but the tiny twist of his lips doesn’t escape her notice.  “Your appearance helped, yes.”

She points to the chair.  “Sit.  Talk.”

He almost looks about to protest, but instead he obeys the first of the commands.

She grins with purpled teeth and falls back into the chair, limbs askew, chin propped on her fist.  “I was fantastic.”

He snorts.

“Oh, don’t  _ even. _  You wouldn’t  _ like _ me if I weren’t fantastic.”

“Do you care to hear what I managed to get out of him, or would you prefer to continue to congratulate yourself?”

“I was enjoying it, yeah.”  She lifts the almost-empty wine bottle.  “Want some more before I interrogate you?”

Severus withdraws his wand, thinks for a moment, and then flicks it.  A bottle comes soaring toward him, nudging open the door to the table.

“Ooh.  The 1962.  You know I like that one.  I’m that good?  Twenty-year-old-wine good?”  She raps the cork with her own wand and it wiggles itself out.  She fills his glass, and then her own, and lifts hers in a cupped hand.  “To the Dark Lord,” she toasts, a smirk twisting her mouth.

He toasts with her.  “All seven parts of him.”


	8. Progress

“The art,” Severus says Lily next morning, before the assembled Resistance, “is called  _ legillimency. _  It is an arcane art, more dependent on the person than any spell or memorization.  I am proficient enough with it myself; most death eaters have come by some form of defence against it or another.”

“Occlumency,” Regulus says.  “Of course.  I’m trained.  We’re not the only ones who have used legillimency, you know.  The other side had it as well.”

“Who’s this  _ we _ you’re talking about?” Lily asks sharply.  “Unless I’m sorely mistaken, the ‘other side’ is  _ us, _ and if Sev knows how to do it, then we  _ do _ have it.”

Regulus looks surprised by this, but inclines his head.  “I suppose that is technically correct.”

“Nothing technical about it,” she replies.

“Regardless,” Severus says, moving his gaze from her back to Regulus, “We will have to train you in the art, Lily, before we can make any sort of move.  We cannot risk your mind giving our secrets away.”

Sirius stands, and waves his wand.  Lily had prepared breakfast again for the four of them, Severus not wanting to experiment with egg preparation before these new allies.  She is confused, for a moment, why Sirius is casting a spell--but then the dishes begin marching out the door.

“Oh.  Thank you,” Lily says, surprised and rising as well.  “Here, I’ll give you a hand.  Show you where things are in the kitchen.”  She looks from Regulus to Severus.  “You’ll show me how to do it, then.  I’m a quick study.  We won’t be a minute, don’t plot too much without us.”

Severus nods and gives a little cryptic frown, but turns back to Regulus, and they begin a heated discussion about some sort of Dark thing that completely goes over Lily’s head.

Lily and Sirius exit, and they follow the floating dishes in silence, watching them shuffle themselves through the air at the behest of his wand.  It is Sirius who breaks the silence.

“I promised James I’d take care of you,” he says.  “I know that you don’t remember it--or me, or us--”

“I remember you, Sirius.  We went to school together.  I just don’t remember being friends with you.”  Her tone is light but she’s watching him for a reaction.

He winces, but not in a way he tries to hide.  “I know.  But--”

She cuts across him and opens the door to the kitchen, blocking his path.  “No.  Listen to me.”  He opens his mouth to protest, but she raises a hand and he shuts it again.  “Sev and I talked it out.  I believe he put the memory charm on me to help me.  I don’t think it was good or selfless, but he did it to keep me safe.  All of this--everything,” she gestures around to the house, her wand, her apron.  “Everything is to keep me safe.  I don’t agree with it, or what’s been sacrificed in the name of my safety, and I think he’s overprotective and a bit mad, but there it is.  His intentions are good, and I’ve helped set those intentions on something greater than just keeping both of us safe.  He’s valuable and talented and he’s on whatever side I’m on.  And,” her voice raising to keep him silent, “the memory charm is breaking down.”

He looks flabbergasted.  “It can do that?”

“He never was very good at charms.”  She smiles and then pushes through into the kitchen, setting the dishes to washing themselves and beginning the rest of the tidying-up.

“Lily,” he begins, sounding pained.

“Oh, skip it,” she says breezily.  “I know what you’re going to say, that he’s a terrible, bad man, that I don’t have to stay here like this, that I’ve already suffered enough and I don’t have to fight or train or whatever difficult and life-threatening thing you think I’m too weak and damaged and female to do.”

“I--”  He shakes his head.  “That’s about the size of it, yeah.”

“I’ll be fine.  As for Sev--he  _ is _ a bad man.  Terrible.  But do you want to try to handle him?  Or leave him to Regulus?  I’ve done the maths on this.  I have to be here to keep him working.  Besides, we work well together, always have.”  She pours herself more juice and leans her hip on the table.  “And it’s not like Regulus hasn’t done the same horrible things in the service.”

“That’s not--you can’t compare the two.”

“How’s it different, then?”

Sirius crosses his arms.  “I went to Regulus and convinced him.  Reg never wanted this.  He never wanted enslavement or total dominance.  He just got caught up.”

“And so did Sev.”

“You didn’t see how he was.”

“Yes, I  _ did _ .  Or are you forgetting that we were best friends almost all the way through school?  Awfully strange, that; if he were changing my memory, he didn’t touch anything incriminating about himself.  Not calling me mudblood after fifth year, or hexing Gloria in the middle of sixth, or that awful Christmas prank that group of Slytherins pulled--nothing.”

“You wouldn’t know if it were missing,” Sirius says.

“I would.  It’d be coming back now, anyway, and it hasn’t.”

There’s nothing for him to say to this, so he sets the clean dishes drying themselves on a dishtowel, and she helps, putting them away by hand.

Sirius is watching her, and he thinks he’s being surreptitious, but she can feel him boring holes through the back of her old 1979 Quiddich World Cup shirt.  It’s almost as if he’s expecting her to break down crying in a flood of tears.  She turns to him, polishing a wine glass.

“Sirius, I don’t know what sort of woman I was, what sort of woman you think I ought to still be, but I’m a solider.  I’ve been looking for an opening for the past three years and in the meantime, I’ve been safe and healthy, which is more than I can say for other muggle-born witches.  Until you came to me, it seemed like the whole thing was ironclad, and Sev couldn’t do anything but--delay his tasks for the Dark Lord.”  She puts the glass down.  “But now here we are.”  She tosses the towel over her shoulder, smiling up at him, and puts a hand on his shoulder.  “Thank you for coming.  Just because I don’t need saving doesn’t mean you haven’t helped.”

He looks at her hand and swallows, and then shudders, as if he’s just had a terrible thought and he’s trying to shake it physically.  And suddenly his arms are around her and his chin is on her shoulder.  He’s breathing into her hair hard like he’s trying not to cry.

She doesn’t have the heart not to embrace him in return.  He is full of breath and warmth and a certain vulnerability in all the ways Severus isn’t, and she rests her cheek against his broad shoulder.  She is reminded suddenly or holding onto the tiny, shaking body of a homesick muggle-born first year, scared witless over the presence of ghosts in the castle.  “It’s okay,” she whispers, not sure what else to say.  Of course, she knows what’s wrong.  It’s what should be wrong with her.  “I’m sorry.”

He shudders again, and pulls her against him hard for a moment, and then lets her go.  “No--no, I’m sorry.”  He passes his hand across his mouth and shakes his great shaggy head slowly.  “I miss him.  James, I mean.  I miss him as much as you--as much as you will.”  He passes his hand across his face again, and when his mouth emerges, it’s a tight smile that looks full of effort.  “Seeing you, like this, like you both were--it just reminds me of him.”

“Of course it does.”  She puts a hand atop his head and musses his hair.  “I wish there was something I could say to help, but all I can tell you is that we’re working to destroy the people who murdered him.”

“Of course,” Sirius says, and his smile gets a little easier and less wistful.  “You’re his Lily all right.  Whether you know it or not.”

She has a few choice thoughts about this, namely that she doesn’t want to belong to anyone, but she keeps her mouth shut.  No need to upset him further.  “Come on.  The boys will miss us.”

“Wait,” Sirius says, catching her arm.

For a moment, she almost thinks he’s going to kiss her.  For a moment, it almost seems as if he is stumbling over this thought as well, but instead he pulls something silvery out of a deep pocket on his cloak.

“Dumbledore had this when James died.  It’s an invisibility cloak.  It should be yours.”

She touches it.  It feels like woven rainwater, like solidified clouds.  “Won’t you need this?”

He smiles.  “My disguise is perfect.  Reg never goes anywhere without his faithful dog.”

She can’t take her eyes off it.  It’s beautiful, and it’s something else too--she recognizes it from nights of having it around her shoulders, running swiftly and silently up the boys dormitory staircase with the thrill of disobedience and lust running hot through her veins, and the boy at the top of the stair waiting for her--  “Thank you,” she says finally, and tucks it into an unused mixing bowl under the kitchen sink.

She doesn’t want to tell Severus about the cloak.  It is an ace up her sleeve, an exit strategy, a final way to keep the fight alive in herself if everything goes to hell.  Which, Lily knows, it very well might.

When they re-enter the sitting room, Severus and Regulus are discussing the availability of basilisk venom versus the use of Fiendfyre and other methods of destroying horcruxes.  Sirius paces while they speak, and Lily takes her seat again, trying to follow the conversation.  There’s no use pretending either Lily or Sirius can be of use here; neither knows any real Dark magic, nothing of this magnitude.  Finally there is a lull, and Lily interjects.

“This is all well and good, but we’ve told you what we found out from Slughorn.  Chances are, there’s seven.  Can’t destroy them til we find them.  What do you know about their locations?”

Regulus glances at Severus, as if expecting him to reprimand her for speaking out of turn, but Severus’ face remains impassive.  With a hint of annoyance in his voice, he answers.  “I have reason to believe that Lucius Malfoy and Bellatrix Lestrange have each been entrusted with one horcrux each.  I do not believe they know the true nature of the artifacts they posses, but they have been instructed to guard them most carefully, and have so far done so.”  Regulus watches Sirius pace for a moment, and then continues.  “This makes stealing and destroying them much more difficult.  If the protections were inanimate, as they were with . . . the one I discovered . . . they could be defeated in a straightforward way with no one being the wiser.  This will require more cunning.”

Lily raises an eyebrow.  “Why?”

“Bella’s absolutely mad, mostly,” Sirius mutters.

Regulus nods ruefully.  “Her wits are . . . not entirely about her.”

“What happened?”

Regulus looks at his folded hands, on the table.  “She was captured by the last loyal faction of the Ministry after it fell and tortured for information.  Starved for days and subjected to Cruciatus curse for hours at a time.  When we finally liberated her and smashed the last stronghold the Minsitry had, we healed her body.  But her mind . . .”

“She’s barking,” Sirius says bluntly.

Regulus shoots him a hateful look.  “Sirius.  A little respect.”

“For  _ her _ ?  She was a murderous bigot before and a madwoman now."

“Her lucidity is somewhat impaired,” Regulus continues, biting his words off sharply and ignoring Sirius, “but she appears to have something like the Sight, now.”

“Voldemort’s favorite pet, as if she wasn’t before,” Sirius grumbles.  

“Sight?  Like a seer?”

“In a fashion.  She also has a nasty tendency to see through disguises and disillusionment charms.  If one is to deceive her, one must do so with cunning rather than magic.”

Lily nods thoughtfully.  “Lucius, then, should be easier to get past.  I imagine it should be easier to visit him for a--a business related reason?”

Severus nods.  “I agree.”

Sirus looks for a moment like he wants to disagree purely to be contrary, but he wavers and then nods as well.  “We think that makes the most sense, yeah.”

“Then it’s settled.”  Regulus rises.  “I think we have enough to work with for me to look into the destruction while you and Lily look into procurement.”

Severus stands as well.  “We will send news as it transpires and keep the hearth quiet otherwise.  Too much communication is suspicious.”

“Agreed.”  With a nod, Regulus returns to the hearth and steps in.  Sirius shoots Lily a smile and follows as a dog, and they disappear together in a whoosh of emerald flame.

After their departure, Severus stands and turns his face toward her to give her a strange look.

Lily smiles up at him bemusedly.  If he wants to know something, she’s going to make him ask.

Finally he says, “What did you and Black talk about?”

“Do you mean Sirius?  There were two Blacks, you know.”  She shrugs, thinking of the cloak.  “He thinks you're evil and wants to whisk me away and keep me safe.”

Severus scowls.  “And what did you tell him?”

She sidesteps the question.  “He wants the same things you want, you know.”

“I beg to differ.”

“Oh, come on.  If you thought for an instant you could get me off this let’s-destroy-he-who-must-not-be-named thing and put me out to pasture, you would.  Am I wrong?”

He pushes his chair back under the table and doesn’t answer.

“That’s what I thought.”

“You didn’t mention what you told him.”  His voice is quiet and cold, but there’s a tiny tremor underneath.

She snorts.  “I told him to sod off.”

One corner of his mouth moves upward.  “He didn’t look told off.”

“That’s because I, unlike you, know how to say things nicely.”

He inclines his head in agreement.  “If you’re ready, I have some time today to begin Occlumency with you.  Tonight I’ll dine with Lucius and see what I can learn.”

“Delighted.”  She offers her hand and he takes it, pulling her lightly to her feet.  She’s in an excellent mood.

They go to the front hall, which is clear and empty, and Severus casts a few wards to prevent a wayward spell hurting the wall.

He tells her how to close her mind, how it’s only the sort of thing that can be practiced and not so much described.

“Grief,” Severus says, “Is one of the better ways.  Sincere grief shuts down the mind entirely.  This can be redirected toward disabling only the memories that might contradict.”

Her good mood doesn’t last long under the strain of performing legillimency.  They work through most of the afternoon, dredging up useless and upsetting things from the bottom of her mind, things she had almost forgotten.  An hour in, she is fighting with Petunia, running through a teenage argument with her mother, sobbing into father’s flannel shirt when she broke her leg, sitting through the terrifying night in the emergency room when her father had his heart attack and holding hands with Petunia for the first time in years--

He breaks the spell again, for what feels like the hundreth time, and pain floods her face again.  She rubs her eyes.

“That grief.  Try to hold onto that.”

“I’m  _ trying. _ ”

Neither of them are saying it, but both of them are thinking it--that this would be much easier if she could remember the loss of Harry and James.  He’s got an annoyed little frown on, the same frown from when she would be particularly obstinate about a piece of Dark magic or a piece of rule-breaking he wanted to do.  “You have to try harder.”

She raises her wand.  “Just do it, Sev.”

He casts the spell again and there they are, outside of the Gryffindor common room, both of them, and she is furious, absolutely livid, and saying,  _ save your breath!  I only came out because Mary told me you were threatening to sleep here. _

And there’s Severus, across from her, much closer than he is now, much younger as well, and the desperation in his voice,  _ I was. I would have done. I never meant to call you Mudblood, it just – _

_ Slipped out?  It’s too late. I’ve made excuses for you for years. None of my friends can understand why I even talk to you. You and your precious little Death Eater friends--you see, you don’t even deny it! You don’t even deny that’s what you’re all aiming to be! You can’t wait to join You-Know-Who, can you? _  And in the righteous anger, she can almost see him again, across from her, shaken by her words then and still shaken by them now, and how right she was, she was completely right in every way, she was right, and he is gaping like a fish both in front of her in the memory and in front of her now.   _ I can’t pretend anymore. You’ve chosen your way, I’ve chosen mine. _

_ No--listen, I didn’t mean-- _

- _ -to call me Mudblood? But you call everyone of my birth Mudblood, Severus.  Why should I be any different? _  And with a surge of triumph, the spell is weakening, she sees her opportunity, and she climbs through the portrait-hole again, and pushes back, hard, against him--

And then, a memory from Severus’ mind, so unfamiliar, so alien--

_ There’s nothing so special about her.  Nothing.  Her eyes are too far apart.  She’s too loud.  She’s obnoxious.  She’s bossy.  She too friendly, too open with everyone.  She’s discarded you without a second glance, and you are a fool for sitting here and-- _

There is a feeling of pressure in the throat, the messy phenomenon of snot and tears shed loudly behind layers of dense silencing wards in an unfamiliar dorm room she had only been in a few times, before he was ashamed of her.  The memory lives behind the green curtains around the bed and on a dirty pillowcase, fists full of sheets and anger and betrayal.  A faint, traitorous voice deep inside him that he deserves every bit of this misery, every bit of this awful hole in his chest, and there is so much filling-in to be done.   _ Pack the wound.  Stitch it shut.  Heal it the long way, like the filthy half-muggle you are-- _

\--And he is on his knees, and she is watching him across the floor.  They both come back to the present but she still sees herself as he sees her: terrifying and beautiful, pale and brilliant and victorious, always victorious, always triumphant, over everything.

There is nothing quite so vulnerable, so vicious as this sincerity, this keening remorse inside him.

“Was that,” she chokes out, “Did I see--”

He stands, fast and instantaneous, and his face is white and trembling with something like rage.  The tip of his wand is glowing red, then white-hot.  He spins, disabling the wards with a sharp crack, and marching out of the front hall, up the stairs, to his laboratory.

If she had been any younger, any more foolish, if her headache hadn’t been his fault, she might have called after him, begged for forgiveness.  But she was right.  She was right the whole time.  His suffering doesn’t change any of what he’s done, then or since.  That blame is his.

“What, so my memories are open season but I see a bit of yours and all the sudden--” she calls after him, following him up the stairs.  She watches him move into the laboratory and follows him through.

From his bench, he snarls back, “That was private.”

“So was everything  _ you _ saw in  _ my  _ head!”

He stands there, still and angry, glaring.  He’s too far away to see it, but she knows his jaw is twitching.

“Get over yourself, Severus Snape!” Lily snaps.  “If you’re going to storm off like an angry teenager every time I make any progress--think about it for more than a second, I threw you out of my brain and back into yours, that’s  _ progress-- _ then this isn’t going to work, and I’ll have to train with someone else.”  She takes a breath, trying to calm her anger.  “I don’t  _ want _ to train with someone else, Sev, but I have to if you can’t handle this.”

There’s a long, silent moment between them.

“You don’t have to train with someone else.”

“Good.  Now come back down here.”  She sighs, rubbing her face.  “We’ll take a break.  I’ll make some tea and--oh--”  Lily stops and her hand moves to her mouth.  “Sev--”

He follows her gaze to the cage.  The mouse--no, the transfigured spoon that they turned into a mouse--is laying on its side and laboring at breathing.  It’s staring at Lily.  She moves to it, putting out her hand, opening the little cage and lays her hand on its side, gently stroking it.  It’s in pain.

“I’m sorry.  Oh, I’m so sorry,” she murmurs to it.

The mouse gazes up at her, takes one great shuddering breath, and then goes still.

With her wand, she turns the tiny, furry body back a spoon--but whether it’s due to its time as a mouse or her own rusty transfiguration skills, the spoon has a great crack down the middle.  She holds it up and out to him.  “The poison works.  If you’re going to back out--if you’re not going to try to stop this--”

He looks at her for a long moment, his face blank, closed.  Finally, he blinks, and nods.  “I’m with you.  I’ll let them know the poison is ready.”


	9. The Second Invitation

He paces a circle around her, looking up and down, hands grasping one another tightly behind his back.  She stands perfectly still and almost expects him to open her mouth to inspect her teeth, like racehorse.  He rubs at a smudge of soot on her shoulder, and then presses his wandtip to it.  It disappears.  The crackle of magic so close to her skin is still intoxicating, despite the fact that she’s had her wand back for weeks now.

“You’ll need a cloak,” he says, and strides to the closet.  He removes an older one of his own and shakes it free of dust.  He points his wand at it and it goes from black to green, with a subtle and beautiful pattern of waving snakes across it.  He mumbles more incantations, and the green darkens, almost to black.  He reaches into the closet again and plucks a cloak pin from one of his own.

“Here,” he says, offering the cloak.  

She is shocked with how soft it is when she takes it.  “What is this made of?” she asks, before she can help herself.

“Puffskein wool,” he says.  “Regulus’ cloak is made of the same.”  He looks immediately as if he wishes he hadn’t said it, and his mouth turns downward again, to the haughty, cold mask that reminds her fleetingly of his mother.  The implication hangs in the air: that he noticed she liked it.

“It’s lovely.”  She swirls it around her shoulders.  It comes precisely to her ankles.

When he reaches forward to pin the cloak shut with the snake with emerald eyes, she doesn’t flinch.  She watches his face for movement.

“Well, I feel ready. Do you feel ready?”  Her brightness sounds forced, even to her ears.

He stops his hands, and then shakes his head and finishes pinning her cloak shut.  The weight of the heavy silver snake drops to her breast, just over her heart.  “You don’t know what they’re like,” he mutters.  “I don’t like exposing you like this.”

“It’s necessary.  You know it.  We’ve done everything we can here  Now it’s time to go out and find them.”  

His frown deepens into a full scowl.

“Come off it.  With my wand, I can defend myself if it becomes necessary.”  She puffs out her chest and thumps it with a fist, striking the snake.  “Gryffindor, remember?”

“Reckless.”  But his look softens. "Only as a measure of last resort." There is an unspoken promise there, too: if she draws her wand, the cover is blown for both of them. They are both doomed. He would have to fight at her side. The look on his face tells her that he knows exactly the extent of what he is doing, and he is still, even now, unsure if it is a good idea to trust her with so much power over him.

She beams up at him, and takes a step closer, taking his hands from his sides.  “I promise I will be careful. I'm just as sneaky as you.”

He lifts their joined hands, as if to ensure she will keep the distance.  He looks down at her fingertips, hanging from his hands as if she were a climber and he were a cliff.  “If you want to go with Sirius and Regulus, I won’t stop you.  I could get another, keep them safe from the worst of it--”

She starts, and her hands fall.  “Why would I leave you?”

He purses his lips and appears to be choosing his words carefully.  “I do not wish to keep you here against your will.”

She raises her eyebrows.  “You couldn’t.”

His mouth is visited by the barest ghost of a smile before he grows serious again.  “That defiance will have to at least  _ look _ stamped out of you.”

“Has it ever been?” she asks with a laugh.

His brows draw together.   “Yes.  Once.”

She opens her mouth, but closes it.  She knows when he was talking about.  Her hand, almost traitorous, reaches forward and tucks a stray bit of hair behind his ear and withdraws, barely having touched him at all.  “I’ll be okay.  I promise.”

It’s been weeks, and with hours of daily training, she’s managed to get up a rudimentary form of Occlumency.  Nothing nearly so good at Severus’ own skills, of course, and nothing that could fool the Dark Lord himself, but enough to keep the basic fumbling of most of the Death Eaters out of her mind and their shared secrets. After all, who would bother to sift through the mind of a slave?

And it will have to be enough. When the invitation to Malfoy Manor came, it seemed the perfect opportunity to perform reconnaissance. Severus himself could not be seen to go through Lucius' things, let alone searching for a horcrux. But she could be less watched than he would be--invisibly, charmed so or with the cloak Sirius had given her that Severus still didn't know about--could look around the Manor with the eyes of a servant in hopes of finding something, maybe in Lucius' papers, maybe somewhere else. Lucius was arrogant. Reckless. His security would be lax, and the rewards of this opportunity were great. And for an event like this, it made sense for some Death Eaters to bring their own personal servants. Though Malfoy Manor was well staffed in mudblood servants, bringing one's own servant to an event like this could be a sign of prestige. And, Lily began to understand, his ownership of her was a unique mark of favor--a former member of the Order of the Phoenix, a confidant of the deceased Dumbledore and mother to the Dark Lord's prophesied destroyer. She was the kind of reward only the most loyal servant of the Dark Lord could ever hope to receive. It made sense to show her off.

Of course, Lily asked why he hadn't brought her with him before. Of course, his mouth went all flat and his brows had gone up as if to say,  _ you know why. _ And the answer wasn't because it was disgusting, or because she was a  _ person _ and not a  _ thing _ . She was a gift he had been given and, like any valuable gift, he was keeping her locked away. Safe.

She tried to remember how good he was to her, then. She tried not to be repulsed by him and how easy he found it to treat her like a thing. Tried not to remember that he had everything he ever wanted except her own self completely cowed enough to be happy with the way things were, or willing to pretend.

It didn't entirely work. But it didn't make it harder to act like a thing, either. And this act--this humble and smiling servitude she has to display--would make him all the more terrifying to his fellow Death Eaters: what must he have done, what must he be capable of to break a woman such as Lily Potter?

That is what is going through her mind when Severus opens the front door for her, and she steps through and sees the creatures before their carriage.

"Severus--what are--are those thestrals?"

He shuts the door behind her and locks it without answering. His face is already a mask, his spine stiff and movements precise. He descends the stairs to the carriage door without sparing a glance for her.

She almost trips following him down the stairs.  _ Stupid, _ she thinks.  _ One foot out the door and you're already gawking like a First Year. Be the broken girl, Evans. Be what everyone expects you to be. Be what he needs you to be for now and maybe he will be what you need him to be when-- _

She doesn't let herself finish  _ that _ thought.

Once the carriage door is shut behind him and a series of wards has been cast to discourage eavesdroppers, his spine slouches a fraction. "Yes," he murmurs. "They're thestrals. I suppose you remember what kind of creature they are. Who can see them."

"Those aren't the only deaths I've seen," Lily says, quickly. Too quickly. Without even being spoken aloud, the names of Harry and James are hanging over both of them again, clouding the air like their breath in the frigid air. "We were fighting a war."

One eyebrow twitches. His voice is almost inaudible. "Were?"

She nods, conceding the point. "Are." After that, silence seems more comfortable.

Out the window, snow dusts down from the slate gray sky like powdered sugar on a dessert. The streets are quiet, orderly, but as the carriage progresses further and further from the town-- _ what town? _ she suddenly realizes,  _ what town have we even been living in? Cokeworth? My world has been so small-- _ the signs of war are apparent. One house in a row of otherwise perfect brick townhomes is a blackened heap of blasted rubble, the wound of its absence hanging like a lost tooth. An abandoned public school's flag is ripped to shreds and half-mast; the other flagpole flies a skull and snake made of shifting smoke, lit green from within. Not a school anymore, then. Or a different kind of school. Lily doesn't ask which.

Once they are in the countryside, the pace seems to pick up, and the countryside becomes a frozen blur. Darkness begins so early this time of year, and that is true whether you are at war or not, Lily knows, so when darkness begins to fall she is grateful for it. It seems more appropriate to be entering enemy territory at nightfall.

The mansion that appears out of the falling gloom is dark and vast, vaster even than the place given to Severus--five times as large, maybe more, she can't tell even as they come up the long and twisting road to the door. She couldn't fathom, before, how it was possible to need the number of servants the Malfoys supposedly had. Now, seeing the Manor, she wonders how they could possibly clean it all.

She looks to Severus, and he looks back. Something flicks behind his face, and it seems he's about to say something, but instead his mouth seals shut and the mask falls once more. Lily takes a deep breath and prepares her own mask, her own character for the viewing: a pleasant and pretty creature without desire, without hope. A vast empty field of snow with no footsteps, beautiful and empty.

One of them answers the door. For some reason, Lily hadn't expected men, but of course there were muggleborn men whose wands would be taken as well. He is well-dressed and handsome enough, if only he would meet their eyes. His mop of long curls falls over one eye and he doesn't brush it away. As things stand, he is courteous to a fault, directing the invitation to enter to Severus' shoes and offering to take his cloak.

"She will take it," he says, and brushes past the man, not even shortening his stride from the sprawling walk. His cloak, unfastened, is suddenly in her hands even as the door behind them clicks shut. "Mind the snow on it," he says, leaving her there in the entryway.

And for a moment, she's glad of those years pretending in front of Death Eaters in their own home. She knows exactly how to begin brushing the snow off the wool so it doesn't track water in, knows how he likes the cloak hung to avoid wrinkles and where to check for dampness inside the hood and at the hem. She doesn't even have a moment of pause to be furious that she knows this. If the war were last week--if the war were even last year--she might wish for a wand or betray herself with a look, but three years has been more than enough time for the muscle memory of service to overtake any habit, and a short few weeks of having her wand back hasn't changed those instincts.

"Where shall I hang this?" she asks the butler.

He still doesn't meet her eyes as he turns. "This way."

Despite the vastness of Malfoy Manor, the servant's corridors still manage to be cramped and overwarm. She hangs her own cloak next to Severus' in the coat room, and pats her pocket to reassure herself that the wand is still there. It is. It nestles safely into the bunched folds of the invisibility cloak.

"Come along," he says to her feet. "Dinner will be served soon. The masters will want their attendants." He glances up as he turns, and the hair falls out of the way for just a moment, and Lily almost starts; he is missing an eye. And recently--the hole is jagged, almost wet, not bleeding freely but bleeding recently enough, glistening in the dim torchlight.

In this moment, Lily Potter knows she is at war again.

He leads her to the dining room in silence and she takes her place behind one of many tall-backed dark wood chairs and waits, thanking her forethought in wearing her most comfortable boots. The others don't look as lucky, as they filter in silently. One of the women is so thin she's shivering, even standing near the chair closest to the hearth. One of the other men has a black eye. Another has two arms full of scars in various states of healing. One has been burned--horribly burned, maimed so badly she has no hair. 

They are mostly women. These are the personal servants of the highest ranking men who overthrew both magical and muggle leadership in Britain and half of Europe. Of course they are mostly women. A few of them even look vaguely familiar. Their eyes stutter when they notice her and she stares right back, blank and pleasant and blank. Fresh snow. Soft and empty. 

The generals announce themselves with the approach of sound and laughter and Lily realizes that not one of these servants has spoken a word. It's Macnair, the elder--his son dead in the war, Lily remembers--a large man with a booming laugh, responding to some jest the younger Lestrange brother has made. Rabastan? Yes, Rabastan, followed by his brother Rodolphus. Faces remembered from surreptitiously taken snapshots, remembered in flashes and fragments from Order missions long locked away, but the names are there. Selwyn deep in debate with Yaxley and Macnair and a gray-haired woman. A bearded group of men she has never seen before, speaking a language she can't understand with Mulciber and Nott nodding along in the center of them. An ancient-looking Rosier elder and his son, and another man--a boy, really, so young he must have been the third generation. And behind him, a darker-skinned man and woman laughing high, tinkling laughs, and finally--Lucius and Severus, deep in conversation. She doesn't dare look at him directly; she lets her eyes slide past him as the rest of the party took their seats at the table. No Regulus, she notes with some small portion of alarm. He would have been invited. These are the noble families and Black is just as noble as Malfoy. Perhaps he is away on the Dark Lord's bidding. Perhaps he is away hunting for a horcrux. Perhaps he is dead.

But there is no time to worry. There are glasses to fill with wine and water, plates to serve--from the left, always from the left--and empty things to be whisked away to the kitchen. This makes sense. This works. The muscle memory helps her. Service at this level is some of the most challenging, though, and she almost makes several mistakes--plates from the left, always from the left--but she follows the smooth, precise movements of the young, dark-haired, heavy-browed girl serving the elder Rosier to her left and manages to correct in time. Severus does not look up at her, not once, but she notices the eyes of the other Death Eaters unabashed, searching her body, curious of this new feature accompanying her master--she doesn't let herself think  _ friend _ . She keeps her smile bland and clean and empty and her eyes moving across them or on the floor. This, too, is a form of espionage.

At the end of the meal, Lucius stands. "Gentlemen," Lucius calls from the head of the table. "Ladies. We have invited you tonight to celebrate our impending victory over the last stronghold of the West: Beauxbatons."

A polite smattering of applause. Some surprised murmuring. The servant to her left goes rigid. Lily wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't been watching her all night for cues.

"We have attacked them on all fronts to no avail. We have taken hostages; they have not opened the gates. We have killed hostages; they have given us not an inch. We have thrown effort after effort at their walls. And now, finally, we have found a weakness."

The red-faced elder Rosier lets out a rowdy  _ here here! _ and others lend their voices to agree. The woman to Lily's left begins to tremble and Lily suddenly wishes she knew the woman's name. She wishes she could tell Severus that something is about to go wrong, horribly wrong. She wishes she could draw her wand and wipe the smug smirk off Lucius' face. She stays still.

"The resistance in the castle will be defeated. Through a combined effort of all the Death Eaters--almost everyone here, in fact--Beauxbatons will fall within the month. That is what we are here tonight to celebrate. I ask that you all lift a glass--"

The assembled lift their glasses, and a waterfall of glasses clinking rings throughout the dining room as the woman to Lily's left begins to cry--at first silently, but slowly louder and louder, her sobs interspersed with French too garbled with tears for Lily to understand--

\--Of course. The girl is a captive, a muggleborn graduate of Beauxbatons. Hogwarts fell long ago, but the candle of hope had not gone out in this girl until now. Her heart is breaking for her school, for people she loves still there, fighting and hiding and dying in that school. She couldn't be more than twenty. She knew their names, their faces--the professors fighting back are her professors. The people Lucius speaks so casually of defeating-- _ murdering _ \--are people she knows and cares for.

The Death Eaters are beginning to notice. Severus doesn't turn, exactly, but he does shift his shoulders and tilt his head imperceptibly toward the door. The door to the servant's exit.

Lily has only moments to act. Too long of a wait and they will deal with her themselves. Too long of a wait and she will will waste this chance. They created of many options, many ways to slip out and explore unseen, and this offers one. She seizes the opportunity.

Just as the elder Rosier begins to turn toward his weeping servant, Lily steps smoothly to the left, seizes the girl's upper arm in a visegrip, and begins marching her to the end of the room.

"What is the meaning--" he begins, but Severus interrupts.

"My servant will take care of the interruption," he says in silken tones.

If there is more, Lily doesn't hear it. She is through the door, it's shut behind her and she's still walking, and she doesn't know where she's going but she keeps marching the girl along the corridor, until they are well out of earshot, around a bend and near a drawing room furnished in white silk and intricate rugs. She drags her in and shuts the door. The girl's grief is free, now, and the smattering of French under her tears sounds like a prayer or a curse. Lily whirls to face the girl she's been dragging, surprised at her own anger, and gives her a shake by her shoulders.

"Be quiet. Be  _ quiet, _ " she demands.

" _ Ils sont mauvais,"  _ she wails.  _ "Ma maison, ma maison sera détruite." _

This plan's execution came together quickly and is threatening to dissolve just as quickly. Lily looks around one last time, forcefully seats her on a white chaise, and steps behind her, removing her wand from her pocket with one quick motion. " _ Somnium, _ " she whispers, and the girl slumps, her sentence trailing off, her tears sliding down her cheeks slowly and then, finally, the flow halting.

Lily takes a breath. She takes another. And that's the end of it. The wand goes away, the cloak comes out, and she dons it. She has to be gone. She has to be gone  _ now. _ Hopefully no one will find the girl out of place here, but this can't be helped. She can only shut the door and hope for the best. And the final thing, as she invisibly shuts the door: she quaffs a vial of a golden potion.

The halls of Malfoy Manor are twisting and vacant and full of gloom. Every door leads to three more. If she didn't know what she was doing, she would be doomed. But the potion she quaffed took weeks to brew, and it guides her--good old  _ Felix Felicis _ , on hand because Severus was nothing if not prepared. She knows what she wants right now. Tomorrow is infinitely distant. Why Severus has surprising quantities of a notoriously difficult potion hanging about is buried under an avalanche of purpose. She doesn’t have to trust him. She trusts Felix. And Felix takes her by the hand.

Up the stairs. Right. Left. Right again. Duck into a dusty hall closet and wait for the footsteps to pass--the carpet is so thick she didn't even notice them coming until they were almost on her. They seem wrong, too close together, like a child's running, but she doesn't think about it. She doesn't think about anything. She moves out and into the hall again, ducking past portrait after sleeping portrait of sad and tired Malfoys. The carpets are increasingly plush and the decorations increasingly lavish. And there is a grand door, with snakes for handles, and she discovers why she has been hurrying: the door swings open, a man steps out, looking for someone, anyone in the hall. After a moment's surveillance, he steps back inside.

When the door shuts behind him, she is in the room.

“We can't linger long,” the man says. He looks feral, unusually ungroomed and hirsute for such surroundings. His teeth are filed to points, and with that she recognizes him. Fenrir Greyback. The werewolf who bit—-who? Remus Lupin or Peter Pettigrew? She couldn't remember.

She lets the memory slip back under again. There is no time for it.

“It’s here,” says a voice that chills her bones from somewhere around the desk. The voice is high, abstracted, different than the last time she heard it. The last time she heard it, it was screaming a spell, and Gideon Prewett flew back and slammed through a brick wall, and then the voice was laughing—

She has to focus. Felix is tugging at her and she is fighting it, and she doesn’t dare take a deep breath to steady herself.

“Bellatrix,” says Fenrir. “Someone will notice you are not in your chambers.”

Beneath the desk, Bellatrix Lestrange chides him in a singsong tone. “They’re eating, eating and drinking.”

“Not for much longer,” Fenrir growls. The warning seems almost half for Lily.

“I know what I am looking for,” she hisses. “I saw something precious being torn to shreds.”

“Your visions aren’t always—“

She shrieks suddenly in triumph so loud Lily jumps, wrenching forth something squirming, something alive—Lily almost thinks it’s a child, but no, it’s a house elf, clutched by the ankle so hard that her fingernails are threatening to draw blood.

“Dobby has done nothing wrong!” the thing cries. “Dobby begs you—“

“Silence!”

The house-elf claps his hands over his face in abject terror.

“There is something that snake has. Something of incredible value. More than anything else he owns. Something given to him by the Dark Lord.”

Dobby shakes his head, beginning to moan.

“I have seen it. I have seen it in dirty hands. Filthy hands. Hands that don’t deserve it. Hands that snuff out the brilliant light inside—”

“No, no, no,” the elf moans through his fingers. Bellatrix gives him a shake once, twice, but he doesn’t stop until her wand tip presses squarely between his eyes.

“Tell me,” she coos, back to the singsong tone. “Tell Auntie Bella where the treasure is, child. Auntie Bella has a treat for you if you do.”

“Dobby doesn’t know any snakes,” he babbles. “Dobby only wants to serve—“

She hisses a spell and the house-elf screams.

Lily’s mind is blank under the cloak. Her eyes are scanning, searching for something, anything, that could lead her to the location of the horcrux while she listens. The only display box is next to Lily, and it is empty, and when Dobby’s screams lessen, Bellatrix flings the house-elf toward it as if he is a rag. The thin and wailing creature lands at Lily's feet.

“Useless,” Bellatrix grinds out. “Useless, useless, useless!”

Fenrir moves toward her and takes her firmly by the shoulder. “We are out of time, Bella.”

She lets out a howl, animal and wild and full of frustration.

“Come on,” he says, and half-carries, half-drags her to the door. “This is just another one of your dead ends and you know it.” Behind them, the door creaks open and shuts once more.

In the silence, Dobby slowly rises to his feet, looking worse for wear.

“Will you tidy the room?” says a cool and wholly unfamiliar voice.

“Dobby kept the secrets,” he house-elf says quickly, looking toward the empty corner that is the source of the voice. “Dobby did not—“

“I know you didn’t.” A woman she remembers slowly resolves from nothingness, dispelling her invisibility charm. Blonde hair, icy eyes, the matched pair born to marry Lucius, on the fringes during school and then, later, in files next to her husband. Narcissa Malfoy. Bellatrix’s sister. Of course. “We must indulge Bella. She isn’t well.”

The house elf nods along vigorously.

“Is it safe?”

“Dobby kept it safe. Dobby always—”

“All the same, I would like to see.”

The house-elf goes to the desk, an ache clear in his movements, and performs some kind of complicated, glowing gesture in the air above it. The top of the desk goes transparent and Narcissa reaches in with the tip of her wand as if prodding a dead thing. She touches what she finds within, and then shudders.

“Good,” she says, turning away and moving to the door. “Tell me if you see anyone else in this room. Anyone at all.” She doesn't wait for him to bring back the false top of the desk to cover the thing inside again before she leaves.

Well. The house-elf won't see anyone, then.

On silent feet, Lily creeps closer. Inside the desk is a book—just that.  A ratty old book with a black cover. It certainly doesn’t look like a treasure, but this is the object of Bellatrix's desire, and Felix is tugging her forward. He cannot be ignored. She has to take it.

She doesn’t dare try to take it with the house-elf there, watching. But she doesn’t dare let this opportunity slip. She moves quickly, pointing her wand and sending a heavy book book flying from a high shelf behind the elf. He whirls at the sound.

Another book is in her hand already, snatched from a shelf. The title- _ -A Vampiric Compendium _ \--disappears from the cover as she transfigures it as as fast as she can into a replica.

“Is anyone there?” the elf calls. Lily sends another book falling, this time in the corner. He follows, voice loud and braver than she would have thought. “Dobby is not scared.”

She reaches in to take the book while his back is turned, but pauses before touching it with her bare hands. She takes out a handkerchief instead and plucks it out, sliding the transfigured book in its place. Tucked into the handkerchief, it disappears into her pocket under the cloak just as the elf turns and returns to the desk. He looks in, confirming the book is still there. Something curious passes across his face when he sees it. He looks thankful, but also repulsed, as if the book is a vile thing.

“Dobby is protecting an evil thing,” he says to the room as he summons the top of the desk back to where it was before, sealing the false book away from view. He looks up, and seems to look straight at her, or through her. His eyes are huge and almost fierce, and it occurs to Lily that she might have more in common with the house-elf than she had thought. “An evil, evil thing.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you've read the endnote at the end of the first prologue? The first few hundred words of the first chapter here represent the very end of the part I wrote in 2011.
> 
> Thus begins the current portion, written in 2017. I hope you enjoy. Please let me know if you do.


	10. Enough

Lily can feel the weight of it in her pocket. It’s heavier than it should be, and warm even through layers of fabric. It’s all she can think about as she returns to her charge abandoned in the white silk parlor.

The girl is still sleeping. That’s good. At least asleep she cannot be an obstacle--and no matter how appalling it is to think of her that way, that is what she would be awake. She shakes her head. She can’t help the girl either. She made a scene. Who knows what the consequence for that will be. She draws her wand. “ _ Obliviate _ ,” she whispers, knowing full well the irony of this. But it’s only a small change, she tells herself, and a small change that will help them both. Instead of being hit with a spell, Lily had sat there, held her hand in silence, and calmed her down. A nicer story than the real one, and her sleeping mind accepts it easily. The guilt is tucked down inside her, below everything else. It is war and she has done worse. She knows she has done worse than this.

And as she crouches next to her, she has to wonder--is this how it went for Severus? One small bad thing, one minor manipulation, cascading down and down until--

Lily shakes her awake then, and the French girl looks up sleepily, confused. “You cried yourself to sleep. Now back to work, come on.” 

The girl shakes her head. “No,” she says. “‘Ee would want me to go to zee stables. To wait for him. I made a fool of myself.” She sniffles, wiping her nose. “Was ‘ee… angry? Did ‘ee seem—“

“I don’t know. I’m sorry if I got you in worse trouble. Blame Master Snape, he told me to take you. He signaled me.” It was the truth, and she deserved that sliver of defense from Lily. “Will yours be mad?”

She laughs, a low throaty sound under her breath as she rises from the couch. “You know zee way of it. Thank you for 'elping me. It would be worse if you ‘ad not.”

The thanks are bitter, but Lily smiles anyway. “Of course.” She entertains the thought of following her as she slips out to the stables, stealing the carriage, running free and wild and gone. She lets snow fall on the fantasy as she turns her back on the hall that leads to the servant’s exit to the stables.

The dining room has dissolved into conversations and cleared plates. Another young man, the same age as the youngest Rosier boy, has taken her place; with her return, he smoothly exits past her, not even looking at her face. He must have been a first year when the war began, she realizes. A child. A captive. He should be in his third year. He should be learning charms and potions. He should be riding a broomstick, dreaming of catching a snitch to win a game, making mischief for Minerva—

She holds onto the grief for this boy’s stolen education and childhood and uses it to smooth her mind. Severus wasn’t wrong. She didn’t know how much things had changed. Destroying the Dark Lord is an errand in the face of this staggering loss, and she can’t feel it now, she can’t afford to let it show on her face. So she freezes it all in ice and goes blank once more. Except now, there is something warm and—is it throbbing? Like an infected wound?—in her pocket.

The guests begin to retire to a massive lounge full of elegant and plush velvet furniture before a roaring hearth. This party of monsters picks at tiny high-frosted cakes with white sugared rose petals, nibbles at cheese, swills madiera and discuss the weather and their murders and the love of their wives. It isn't long--Severus nurses his glass, but she only refills it once, and he makes a motion to cut her off before it's even halfway full. Macnair, his current companion, protests, but Severus says he, more than anyone else, knows there is work to be done and his wits must be about him. The smile that brings to the Death Eater's face makes her want to scream. The book in her pocket seems to twitch again, as if there's a rat inside of it moving it to and fro with a furious burrowing.

Mercifully, finally, Severus rises and she takes a step forward from the wall. He glances to her feet, and she follows him out of the room. A servant brings the thestrals to the front. Escape is so near that Lily can almost taste it, and she is so ready to leave this place of suffering and strangeness that she almost misses Narcissa's approach as they near the grand front door. She’s holding something large—no, not something, someone. A child, about four, a powder blue blanket draped around his shoulders, leaning sleepily on his mother's shoulder, feet dangling loosely. A blonde-haired child with large, soft, curious eyes and a finger in his mouth, watching them come to a halt before himself and his mother. His eyes do not slide past her the same way Narcissa’s do.

“Be well, Severus,” Narcissa says warmly. Her face is transformed when she speaks to someone she considers an equal. Another fact to file away. Severus inclines his head and murmurs a polite farewell, but Narcissa isn’t listening. She takes a step toward Lily. Another. She smells of milk and powder.

Lily focuses on breathing smoothly. A sickening fear is building in her stomach, and the heat in her pocket is burning.

“What an interesting creature you’ve got here,” she says over her shoulder. She reaches out, lifts a piece of hair from the side of Lily’s head, runs her fingernails through it the way she would a piece of fine silk. And the child’s eyes are still watching. She can't help but do the math and think this child would be the same age as— no. No. Not here. Not now. But the book is so warm on her leg, melting the ice, and the child could have been friends with her own, classmates with the one she can’t remember—

Narcissa drops the lock of her hair and turns away. “Let us know if she doesn’t keep you happy,” Narcissa says breezily. “We’d love more pretty ones like this. You could take your pick of ours. I bet she'd do well with Draco.” And she floats past Lily, arm almost brushing her own in all its gooseflesh. She can feel the child’s gaze on her as his mother carries him away down the hall.

Severus is pale and blank, mouth thin and tilted into a tiny puzzled frown. They wait for one heartbeat longer, and then he jerks his head and she follows.

In the carriage, the door is barely shut when she opens her mouth, ready to pour it all outto him. But he makes a sharp slicing movement, and then reaches for her face, gently, carefully--

For a moment, it seems almost as if he is going to kiss her, and she is paralyzed by this more than anything else that has happened tonight. His cold fingertips graze her ear, and then—

He is lifting her hair away from her head, wand in his other hand, and something strange and wriggling is suddenly visible and writhing at the end of the lock of hair, like a maggot.

“Amateurs,” he spits, and cuts the lock of hair from her head. The wriggling thing is beneath the heel of his shoe in a moment, and a brilliant smear on the floor in another.

“What was that?”

“A rare creature, obtained at some expense. The loquotor moth.” He’s sneering, now, superior and smug. “A magical caterpillar that is invisible until it transforms into a moth. Its wings show moving images it saw when it was a caterpillar. From a rainforest somewhere. Very expensive. Very difficult to raise. Unreliable for spying for specific detail, but very useful for discovering other things. Abuse, affairs, organized crime or insurgency--patterns in the observed surroundings. Useful for a few obscure memory potions. Most likely enchanted to return after its transformation. It was a child’s ploy to try it.”

“What could they possibly suspect?” She resists the urge to pull out the book from where it scorches in her pocket, to open the door and throw it into the frozen moat where, she is certain, it would melt through the ice and boil it all away.

“Rumors,” he snaps, angry at her now, glancing out the window at the accelerating landscape. “There are always rumors. This is just pointless game-playing. It doesn’t matter.”

It was on her, she realizes. So someone must suspect that their relationship wasn’t exactly the frosty servile one it was supposed to be. Or perhaps— “And when it doesn’t return?”

He scoffs. “They are fragile creatures. She will assume it died. One way or another.”

“And what if this wasn’t an attempt to spy?”

This thought freezes him. He narrows his eyes. “Is that what you think? That she was smuggling you magical ingredients to craft a memory potion?”

“Do they know about what you did to me?”

His lips curl in disgust. He doesn’t like the way she said it, but it’s the way it happened, so she doesn’t apologize. Finally, he says, “Explanations were made. To more people than just the Dark Lord.”

She looks down at the smear on the floor, and then back up to him. He looks uncomfortable. His jaw works. 

“Interesting,” is all she says. Let this consume him, she thinks with a sudden flare of anger. Let him think about how far gone he must be that the wife of a Death Eater might be trying to save her, or at least learn the truth of her life--her small, small life, full of cooking and cleaning like a Muggle housewife for a man who took everything from her. Let that silence stretch and let him live inside of it, she thinks, the book throbbing in her pocket to the beat of her furious heart.

On their return, she recognizes the outskirts of Cokeworth this time from a distance, the same approach her father took on their way home from childhood trips. Her childhood home. The place where her parents raised her. Where Severus showed her magic. Where she lost Petunia, and where her father died, and where Severus keeps her in a gilded cage. Where he brought the plunder of war to the house his father beat him in. Where he was gifted a new and vast home befitting his station. The home they come to, finally, after miles upon miles of silence. The thestrals and the carriage know how to put themselves away, so she follows him up the steps to the door. She wonders if her mother is still alive, here in Cokeworth or anywhere on the planet, or if she has been lost along with everyone else. The wards come up around them both and Severus shuts the door. What else has he taken from her? The question is a bottomless hole. How much has he stolen? Everything comes back to him. Everything. How? Why? The book's fervent twitching has given way to a persistent tremble, and she is suddenly furious, mad with irritation at the book, at Severus, at the howling pit of empty that is her memory. She scrabbles in her pocket, trying to remove the book, wanting to tear it to shreds, sending her wand rolling across the floor in the process. The handkerchief tears, but she claws the book free and flings it across the hall, blind with a sudden fury. It hits a tapestry and slides to the floor—impotent. Lifeless. It’s as if light suddenly has cut through a fog, or the end of a pernicious toothache.

“Oh god,” she gasps, suddenly realizing that the only possible culprit is the book. “Sev, that thing—it’s evil.”

Hearing her frustration, the struggle with the book and the violence, he had turned with his wand raised. But it’s clear he doesn’t understand—and how could he?

“I think I found the horcrux,” she explains. “I took it.”

He turns slowly toward where it lays across the room, wand still up, face aghast. “You  _ took _ it.”

The story comes out of her in a garbled rush—finding the study, watching Bellatrix and then Narcissa and then the falsified copy of the book she left in its stead. His face goes increasingly crimson with what she suspects is rage as she speaks.

Once she is done, he finally opens his mouth, voice shaking with fury. “You took a powerful Dark artifact from the home of someone who trusts me, someone whose trust I need to keep in order for either of us to stay alive, when you knew our only goal was to take the measure of things. You brought this artifact into my home without informing me, without knowing what it could do. You did all of this alone, without my help, because you think—you  _ think! _ —you found something valuable and opportunity presented itself.”

“It wasn’t me, it was Felix, and besides—“

“Enough.” His hand slashes through the air, and his wand is trembling in his hand. “I have heard enough.” Crossing the room in a few quick strides, he lifts the book steadily with his want, not daring to touch it. “I will put this somewhere safe. Regulus will be prepared to destroy it soon.”

Anger flares again, without the fevered intensity the book gave her, but anger all the same. “Severus, you can't punish me like this, what am I supposed to do?”

His face twists, then, still flushed with anger. “You have done enough.”


	11. The Philosopher's Bell Jar

Lily doesn’t see him until almost midnight the next day. After their shouting match in the entry hall, she slunk off to her chambers to sleep off the exhaustion of the night. And the next day there is nothing to do again. There is an upper limit to reading one can do, she discovers, while she is trying to avoid a walking black storm cloud swooping around the house like some kind of skinny petulant bat, and his anger hasn't cooled. If anything, it's solidified. She feels oddly light and giddy over taking the diary, whatever it may be--even if it isn't a horcrux, it must be something of value, something they can use. But however large it may be, the house is not large enough to contain his anger. And bitter though it may be, it does better serve her purposes to keep him happy with her. She doesn't intend to apologize, exactly, but she doesn't intend to let things go on like this either.

When she finally does see him, it's in the laboratory. She ducks in to see if she could make something useful--anything useful, more Felix, polyjuice, anything!--and finds him there.

It is as if a terrible wind has swept through. The tables have been shoved roughly to the walls, stools and chairs at them tilted at odd angles and some upended entirely. The diary hangs midair, surrounded in a spherical grid of bright white light that rotates lazily on its axis. She recognizes it: the philosopher's bell jar, a kind of a shield charm that holds whatever it contained in a sort of a stasis. A tricky bit of charm work. She let out a whistle, impressed he managed it alone--typically four wizards are required to create a strong one.

Severus turns, scowling already. "Get out."

"How well did that work last time?" she challenges, lobbing an apple his way. She intended to snack on it herself while she rummaged for something to work on in the laboratory, but it serves her purpose, throwing him off and letting her closer to the diary in its shell.

Severus has never had physical acumen outside of dueling, but he does manage to duel the apparently threatening apple, sending a wordless jet of flame toward it. The scorched core rolls toward his feet and he bends, confused, to pick it up.

"You need to eat," she explains. "You haven't all day."

He scowls at the apple core and then at her.

"Good bit of spellwork here," she volleys, turning her gaze back to the book and its shield. "Bet it would have gone easier with two."

"I wouldn't have had to do it at all if it weren't for you," he snarls.

"Hmm," she says, not paying attention. "So, was I right?" She starts flipping through his notes, open on the table in a not entirely dissimilar--though less abused--notebook of their own. The letters  _ T. M. Riddle _ are written large, in Severus' crooked cramped cursive. Above, the same letters, letters she hadn't noticed before, were written faintly on the cover of the notebook.

"Yes," he says, quieter this time, as if he's almost afraid to anger the thing. "It's a horcrux. There are layers upon layers of Dark magic on it. Too many to explain, but one of them--yes."

She looks sidelong, not turning to face him yet. "Did Regulus and Sirius tell you how to destroy it?"

"We know how to destroy it," he snaps, ever unable to leave an affront to his intelligence unchallenged. "The question is, how will it react when we do?"

She looks him in the eye, finally, and he's still clearly cross with her, but there's a puzzle before him and he's never been good at turning that kind of thing down. So she asks: "What do you mean?"

A professor's lecturing serves to soften his biting tone. "Horcruxes are not just objects that can be destroyed. They are resilient, they are self-repairing, and--most crucially--according to Regulus' research, in extreme cases they have been known to fight back against their own destruction. Of course, this is all based on recordings from hundreds of years ago, so it may be false. I've slipped Regulus a note in the Vanishing box, but I haven't had a response."

She looks from him to the book, now sinister, slowly rotating in its sphere. "Will  _ he _ know? When we destroy them? There's more than one, if he can feel it--"

"We believe he won't feel it. That's the entire point of the horcrux, to shelter a portion of the soul completely away from the rest in order that, when one portion is destroyed, the other is left completely intact." He approaches her side, now. "I also have reason to believe that this was the very first he made, meaning it may be more powerful than some of the rest."

"Is that a historical fact, or speculation?"

"Speculation," he concedes. "No one has ever made more than one that I know of."

"That you know of." She nudges his shoe with her own. "Not a bad bit of speculation, though. Are you through being mad with me?"

He frowns. "No."

"Fair enough. I did go off plan."

He tilts his head as if he's surprised. She hasn't apologized, exactly, but it seems to be enough. She can feel his eyes on her again, and after a stretch of clean and not entirely unfriendly silence, he speaks, still with anger, but more quietly.

"I hated every minute of that. Taking you out. Showing you off like a racehorse. Putting you in danger. Making you serve me."

"I've served you before," she reminds him gently. "In front of many of those people, in this very house."

"Not like that. Not out of this place and its wards. Not surrounded by--"

"Other people like me? Other mudbloods? Other slaves?"

His jaw works again and it's a moment before he is done swallowing that. Lily can see five steps ahead in the inevitable sharpening of this same old hatchet, so she cuts him off before he can retort.

"I know you don't like it but I'm not a child, and I'm not a thing that needs to be kept safe. I'm a person, an adult woman, and I get to choose my risks the same as you. This is the world you fought to create, Severus, and if you don't like it--we have to change it."

His scowl only deepens. "I could do without the lecture."

Lily suspects suddenly he could probably do without being pushed to act at all, that he would be perfectly content to live out his days and her own the way they had been, making pleasantries over dinner and with her off-balance and scared and ignorant of half of her past, forced to cower under his protection. But it's the worst thing she could say right now. It's unkind, and unworthy, and if she's honest with herself she just doesn't like thinking that of him no matter how true it may be. She's can't fight the war alone. His help, his power, his access are the only tools she has.

"Severus--" she sighs, pushing her hair back. "You're all I've got."

And it's the truth. She means it. She does care for him, despite it all, more deeply than she can imagine caring for some long-lost husband or the ghost of a child. 

His eyes go soft as a melting chocolate in her pocket, and all the anger is gone from him. His spine wilts like a cut flower. Severus looks as if he's about to speak, and she isn't a fool, she  _ knows _ the shape of the monster in the room but can't bear to hear him say its name, so she turns from him.

"I'll check the Vanishing box. Maybe Regulus has responded." And she's gone, slipping through  the door before he can say anything that will complicate everything even more--no matter how badly she might like to hear it.

\---

Sirius lets out a long, low whistle. "No time wasted, Lily."

"Don't encourage her," Regulus snaps, eyes still on the philosopher's bell jar. He looks paler than normal, and his hands won't stop wringing. "What she did was reckless beyond measure. Possessing something like this is dangerous even if they hadn't  _ stolen _ it from under the nose of the Malfoys."

Severus doesn't say  _ I told you so _ , but she does meet his gaze and he twitches an eyebrow humorlessly. It had been a warm few days between them between the notes and this arranged midafternoon meeting, and Lily is willing to let him have his little victories. Frankly, once the Felix was completely out of her system, she was taken aback by her own rashness too, but what was done was done and what  _ she _ had done brought them substantially closer to their goals.

"Still," Sirius says glibly, ignorant of the drama playing out behind her. "Can't argue with the result."

"It was Felix Felicis," she interjects before the Blacks could get to squabbling. "I don't think we should use it again unless we have to. Too risky, when the potion takes the reins; you can't always control what you want or how you get it. And overconsumption has its own dangers."

"Snape will just have to take it next time," Sirius says, grinning over his shoulder wickedly.

"I think he'd sooner drink hemlock."

Sirius laughs, but Regulus cuts him off, annoyance and a deeper fear clear in his voice. "If the bell jar will hold, then we should disguise it, hide it, and be done. It is likely aggressively cursed and should be far away from any living human so it harms no one, let alone put any of us at risk for discovery. We have other matters to discuss--Sirius and I have reached an impasse in our research. We have a list of items that are possible horcruxes but they are difficult to find. Impossible, some of them, without deeper research or a source closer to the Dark Lord than I, and such a search might prove fruitless if we are wrong. But with this, I think there may be other research to be done. Very, very carefully."

"You're talking as if you already have a horcrux of your own," Lily jokes.

Regulus shoots her a sharp, momentary look and returns to inspecting the bell jar charm.

"You're joking," she gasps, realization dawning on her suddenly. "You've had one and didn't tell us? When were you planning on letting go of  _ that _ little gem?"

Surprisingly, it is Sirius who speaks up. "Reg doesn't like to talk about it."

"What is it? What did he use?" Severus demands, just as shocked, anger burning through his words.

Regulus dabs at his forehead with a handkerchief. "Salazar Slytherin's locket. Passed down through the family. We've been hunting for things associated with the other Founders of Hogwarts, but they--like Rowena Ravenclaw's diadem, Gryffindor's sword--can't be found, or if they can, not easily. But there's only apocrypha. We could spend years chasing down--we  _ have _ spent years chasing down dead ends--there are rumors and very little else to--"

"What protections were around it?" Severus presses, despite how ill Regulus looks.

Sirius steps between his brother and Severus, his face set, hand free to draw his wand if need be. "I  _ said, _ Reg doesn't like to talk about it. Don't you get it? This upends everything we were looking at. Reg is right, this is just some ratty book, not a magical artifact."

"It's more than that," Regulus adds, steadying himself on the table to strengthen himself against his unsteadiness. "It's--it's  _ sentimental _ . Not just a… an artifact." He sways.

"What else are you keeping from us?" Lily demands.

"Keeping from you?" Sirius roars. "We almost died getting the last one. We both did. If it hadn't been for--"

Regulus is pale as a sheet and he turns, finding a chair to sit in. "Stop," he says, his voice hoarse. "Please."

Sirius is by his brother's side in an instant, hand on his shoulder. He glares fire at both Lily and Severus over his shoulder, but his attention is on his brother. "We can go. We should leave right now."

"No," Regulus says unsteadily. "I just … need a moment."

Lily isn't afraid of Sirius' wroth. "I'm sorry, Regulus, but it's obvious the rest won't be this easy, and the locket has done  _ something _ to you, so if there's something we need to know--"

"Lily," and she's surprised that the hand on her shoulder and the voice belong to Severus. She's so surprised she falls silent, and he steps forward, speaking over her to Sirius. "If you can bring Regulus, there are chairs he can rest in in the library across the hall. I will make tea. I know how he takes it."

Sirius glares at both of them again, but nods, and helps Regulus to his feet. He walks like a man in a trance, staring not at but past them.

In the kitchen, she finds Severus putting the kettle on. "What did you do that for?"

"You were pushing him too hard," Severus says flatly. "Have a little tact. If he's hiding this from us, he could be hiding more, and pressing too hard will yield little."

"He  _ lied _ . They both did."

"A lie of omission, but not an innocent one all the same." Severus retrieves the tea set. "It may explain why they seem unwilling to actually attempt to retrieve the horcruxes. It may fall to us to do that."

"Regulus does seem… fragile." Suddenly Severus' protectiveness doesn't seem so unreasonable. "Do you trust them?"   
  


Their eyes meet over the tea set, and his are narrowed at her. "I have to, don't I?"

She snorts. "Here, give him some of the biscuits too, that might help."

It takes the whole pot of tea and half a packet of biscuits, but color does return to Regulus' cheeks, and when it does, he's ready to talk, no matter how Sirius tells him he doesn't have to.

"The Dark Lord created a trap. It was in a remote location. The locket was at the bottom of a potion that you had to drink. It makes you--relive things. Horrible things. Every awful thing you've ever done or seen, and more. And then you are dying of thirst, but-- there was a lake." It comes tumbling out of Regulus, as if he has to be purged of it. "The lake was-- we weren't alone. There were Inferi-- Human corpses animated with Dark magic. Hundreds of them. I-- I knew some of them. Remembered their faces." Regulus sips, and the teacup only rattles in the saucer a little. "We went in ready for anything, but not that. Never that."

"Had to drag him out," Sirius adds. "If I hadn't been there--" Sirius doesn't finish but the way he looks at Regulus, it's clear that the young man would not have survived. "But we left a decoy, same as you did, Lily. Transfigured a false locket and left it there. Quick thinking on your part. Won't fool anyone who knows what to look for, but it could fool a lot of others."

"How did you find out about it in the first place?" Lily asks, this time purposely gentling her tone.

"Our house-elf. Kreacher." Regulus shudders. " _ He _ tested it on him. All of it."

"And he survived?" says Severus.

Sirius grimaces. "Unfortunately."

Lily starts tapping her foot. She wants to pace but doesn't want to unsettle Regulus again. "All right. Thinking out loud, then. Of the six horcruxes we suspect exist, one is a locket belonging to Salazar Slytherin. Makes sense, he's was originally behind the pureblood push anyway. The second is the diary--a common item, could have been hidden easily on a bookshelf, but instead left to be protected. So there are both items of magical significance and--what? Personal significance?"

Sirus nods along. "If it's something from his past, before he was the Dark Lord, Slughorn might know, same as before."

"No. We can't press him further about the Dark Lord. He can't be trusted," snapped Severus.

Lily tapped her lip with a finger. "Dumbledore would know. Dumbledore was at Hogwarts when the Dark Lord was, and never got taken in the way Slughorn did."

Sirius looks concerned. "Dumbledore is dead, Lily."

"I know. I  _ know. _ I'm not losing it. But Dumbledore wasn't a fool, you remember, Sirius--he wouldn't have just let the information die with him. Someone else must know the things he knew. At least some of them. What about one of his most trusted advisors--one of the people who helped him run the Order of the Phoenix. She's still alive, isn't she?"

  
Sirius' face is marred with anger again. "McGonagall, you mean? Yeah, they didn't kill her. She's alive. In Azkaban."


	12. Azkaban

It turned out to be easier than any of them had thought.

Once again, the poison for Beauxbatons provided cover. The work of the Dark Lord, as it turned out, is indistinguishable from the work to undermine the Dark Lord, at least in these early stages. They are currently poisoning a school of magical children, poised to take it over. If there were any unknown reinforcements, who better to ask than a former Hogwarts professor? McGonagall would have traveled there over the years, met with those professors, worked alongside them, read their research, corresponded--it made sense to interrogate her. Most static defenses of a castle like that would be based on Transfiguration anyway, and she was an expert in that. It is an easy sell to the guards. It is only a touch harder, bringing a mudblood along, but Severus could be intimidating when he wanted, and they know where he stood in the Dark Lord's favor.

\--Not for long, when the poison failed, Lily reminds herself. They need a plan in case Severus fell further out of favor than originally anticipated. He had reassured her that there could be excuses made about deployment, who poisoned the river and why they were at fault, that he has already set a few brutes to take the fall, brutes no one would lose sleep over, but ultimately it is a chance they have already taken. There are so many ways, she realizes, that it all could go wrong. Horribly, gorily wrong. What punishment would there be for a traitor like Severus? What punishment could there be for  _ her? _

Of course her thoughts are dark as she walked down the hall to McGonagall's cell. They are surrounded by Dementors. Even the shadows look ravenous. She would have to practice the Patronus charm more when they got back home. She knows how to do it, of course, had already cast it, remembered from her days in the Order patchy though they were, but suspects when she tried to think of the memories she used to produce the charm before it would be a great soft blankness. Her only comfort, bizarrely, is the straight spine of Severus before her, following the guard Auror to the cell door that held Minerva McGonagall. And isn't  _ that  _ an odd thought, but it works. Anything to keep the despair from rising too high.

The keys are old, rusted, and the lock sounds half broken when the key is turned. But of course, they wouldn't need real security here. Even a perfunctory obstacle to escape would keep a captive trapped. The walls and locks are not the real prison.

"Don't stay longer than you have to. I'll be back in half an hour to take you out. Some people," the guard Auror inclines his head meaningfully at Lily as he speaks, "are more affected by the Dementors than others, if you catch my meaning, Master Snape."

He nods curtly. "I will expect you in a half-hour. Leave us."

The guard nods and strides away, leaving the half-ajar door for them to open.

Lily isn't sure what she expected, but Minerva McGonnagall looking hale and healthy and as if she is about to take ten points from her own house isn't it. She stands at the center of the room, her robes worse for wear but still  _ herself. _ Lily can't imagine how she's done it. Minerva is rock steady and patient, hands clasped behind her back, as Severus casts the litany of spells to give them privacy. Lily's wand isn't on her--it was too risky to bring in case she were searched--so she waits patiently, eyes still downcast, maintaining the image.

Once he is done, he puts his wand away and stands, facing her. "You're looking well, Minerva."

"You as well, Severus," she replies icily. "I'll make sure I change that when I get out of here."

"Don't," Lily interjects, more pleading than she would have liked. "Don't, Professor, please."

Minerva recoils from Lily's words. "How could you do this, Severus? I remember how close you were in school, you were inseparable, and now you drag her around like a puppet--"

"I'm not a puppet," Lily says, louder. "And if anyone's dragging anyone, I'm dragging him."

They are both looking at her, now, shock evident on both their faces.

She steps forward, glances to Severus, and then gives a faint smile. "The fight against the Dark Lord isn't dead."

McGonagall's face doesn't change. If anything, it becomes more deeply troubled. Finally, she steps forward, bending toward her. "Lily--after what he's done--after what he's  _ taken-- _ "

Lily shakes her head, trying to shake the thought lose. "I know. I  _ know _ . We don't have the time. I've made my peace with it for now. You just have to trust me. We are working together."

McGonagall glances at Severus again, unconvinced, and Severus' face is as much a mask as the Death Eater mask he wears. It's almost as if Minerva can see it there. She probably  _ has _ seen it, Lily realizes. They both have, in battle, the masked man who cast unique and horrible curses, and wondered,  _ is that him--is that the child I knew, once _ ?

"There are bigger things than James and Harry, Professor. Bigger things than revenge. Like T.M. Riddle."

McGonagall's attention snaps back to Lily, and in the closeness of their faces the illusion of strength and health falls away as posture and shadow. McGonagall's face is sharp and hollowed, nervous, unready for this. She isn't protected, then. Just proud and fierce. And suddenly trusting. A calculus has occurred: these words, a key to a door they had only hoped existed.

"You know, then. The true identity of the Dark Lord."

Lily and Severus share a glance. Severus is the more adept liar, so he answers. "We have suspected."

"Tom Marvolo Riddle," McGonagall whispers, passing a hand across her brow. "Dumbledore was looking everywhere for more on him, before he died. He was convinced there was something in his past that would give us the power to defeat him. That he could not be simply killed outright." McGonagall sags. "He was right, wasn't he?"

They can't give her anything. They had agreed to that before they even came here: they can't know they won't interrogate her after they leave, or later, if things go wrong. "I'm sorry," Lily whispers. "We can't tell you."

"You don't have to tell me. After James died, did--do you know what happened to the cloak? You don't have to tell me where--"

"Yes," Lily answers, unsure of where this line of inquiry leads. She can feel Severus looking at her, now, from behind his carefully neutral face. "It's safe. They don't have it."

"Good. He has the wand, of course."

"The wand," Severus says, a question beneath his tone.

"The Elder Wand. One of the Hallows," McGonagall answers.

"The Deathly Hallows?" says Severus. "That's a children's tale."

"Not according to the Dark Lord," snaps Minerva, evidently not through with her fury at Severus. "Our sources--yes, boy, we had sources inside the Death Eaters that your  _ friends _ don't know about--they knew he was obsessed with the search after he believed he defeated the prophecy. He took the wand from Dumbledore's body before it was cold. It was Grindlewald's before that, and a thousand others. And Dumbledore suspected that the Dark Lord already knew and perhaps even possessed the Ressurection Stone, leaving only the security of the cloak between him and possible immortality."

Of course. She doesn't remember the infant she read it to, but she remembers the story. Gifts given to three brothers by death itself, gifts that could protect the user from death. And the cloak, the invisibility cloak that didn't wear out like other cloaks, the cloak she used to sneak up to the boy's dorm in her seventh year, the cloak Sirius had returned, sat at this very moment in a damned  _ mixing bowl _ under the sink of a home owned by a Death Eater, a home that was a gift from the Dark Lord himself.

Dumbledore  _ knew _ what James had inherited and hadn't told them. Bastard.

But it isn't important now. What is important now was horcruxes, what they were, how to find them, how to destroy them. The Stone was something, but it could be a dead end--

"We don't have time for this," Lily says, over her shoulder to Severus.

"We think there is something else Dumbledore was investigating," Severus says, tentatively. "Was there anything else--"

"There were a thousand things," McGongall interrupts, rubbing at her temples. It's as if talking to them has begun to wear on her exponentially; all her years in this place heaping upon her. She looks to Lily. "You know how he was. Schemes within schemes. Even I didn't know everything. It was safer that way."

"You know enough. Think--was there any artifacts he was investigating, anything… powerful? Anything of historical or magical significance, or any items of significance to the Dark Lord himself? Perhaps even ones that were significant to Tom Riddle?"

McGonagall smiles a wan, sick, defeated smile. "Lily, there were a thousand things and more. I can't help you."

"Anything associated, maybe, with the locket of Salazar Slytherin?"

"Lily--" Severus moves to cut her off, but McGonagall tilts her head.

"No, I believe there was something. A house-elf." McGonagall's mouth works and she touches her temples again. "A house-elf that belonged to a woman--Hepzibah Smith. That's it. She used to run Borgin & Burke's, before even I was a student. She showed the young Tom Riddle two things in her shop, and he murdered her for it, and used a false memory charm to convince the house-elf she had done it. The locket of Slytherin and the cup of Helga Hufflepuff. It seemed important but it never came to anything." Her hands fall away, and exhaustion appears on her face. "That's all I know."

"It's more than enough," Lily says. "Severus--"

Severus isn't satisfied. "Do you know anything about Rowena Ravenclaw's possessions--her staff, her diadem? Or the sword of Gryffindor?"

But they can all hear the footfalls approaching, stopping before the door, rusty keys moving in a lock.

"No," says McGonagall quickly, "He couldn't have gotten the sword. It wouldn't go to him, it's not it's nature, and no one who followed him could get it. The staff is a myth, as far as we know. As for the diadem--"

Severus draws his wand, snapping it sharply through the air to shatter the charms protecting the room, then pointed it at McGonagall.

The old woman freezes. She door creaks open. Lily's eyes are already down.

There is a moment of frigid silence, and then Severus speaks, his voice cold and arch once more as he tucks his wand back into his robes.

"Too late," he says, "Next time, remember Dark Lord rewards those who help him." And with that vague lie in place as their only cover, he turns without looking at either of them to go.

Lily doesn't dare look at McGonagall again as they exit. It is too much to risk.

On their way back, the carriage is silent until they are almost all the way back. Finally, Lily speaks.

"What was her crime?"

Severus looks as if he's been woken from sleep. "Her crime?"

"What did McGonagall do to get put--there? In Azkaban?"

"Ah." He settles back further in his seat. "I believe the official charges were new ones. Encouraging magical theft by educating muggleborns, for example. Advocating for blood traitors. And so on." He shakes his head as if to clear it. "I wanted to protect her, but there was nothing that could be done."

Lily is surprised by this. And there's a kernel of hope in it, as well. "I wish we could get her out of there."

Severus' breath mists the window as he speaks. "It isn't possible."

"Isn't she an Animagus? Can't she get out on her own? As a cat? On our first day of class--"

He waves his hand to stop her, but he is still elsewhere, thinking, still focused on the impressionist landscape blur outside. "She was registered with the Ministry when it fell. The cell is specially warded against it. She can transform, but not pass the threshold. There are ways, I imagine, to fool the Dementors. But none of them involve leaving an empty cell."

Lily joins him in gazing out the window, the wind howling distant, ominous as his words. "At least she doesn't have to live through that place as a person. I can't imagine what that would do to a person."

He doesn't respond. He's still looking out the window, studying something inside his own head intently, brow drawn together and dark eyes closed.

But as the thestrals return and she reaches for the door, he places his hand on it. His words come out in a rush, as if he has been unsure if he should speak at all.

"Bellatrix Lestrange carries a cup with herself at all times. It's the only thing she'll drink from. It's small, made of gold, heavily enchanted--everyone assumes it was intended to heal her, to provide medicine with her wine, or at least to keep her under control." Severus swallows, as if he has wanted to hide this information but found himself unable. "I can't be sure, but--"

"Hufflepuff's cup," Lily whispers, both excited and horrified at how difficult it will be to take unnoticed. "She has it. In plain sight."


	13. Sparring

It is made clear from the start that Regulus is unavailable to assist in actually stealing the cup from his terrifying mad cousin, and, moreover, thinks they were all fools for trying. Sirius is downright eager to help but could not do so as a human, and Bellatrix is notorious for murdering any animal she found, no matter how beloved or small for precisely this reason--to ferret out Animagi. Severus will, of course, follow her lead, but neither he nor Lily has any  _ ideas _ . An inauspicious start, to be sure, but Lily is not about to demoralized by it. Severus insists they plan more, execute cleanly, and even Sirius agrees that more had to be done before they could hope to take the Cup from Bellatrix--there would be no Apparating to her doorstep and sneaking around under an invisibility cloak hoping to stumble upon an opportunity. Further, there is the issue of the book. It must be hidden, and well; an escape plan must be made in case of their discovery; appearances must be maintained throughout.

Weeks slip by this way. She bakes a cake for Severus' birthday--a gooey, lopsided, vanilla-frosted monstrosity--and he reminds her he is capable of smiling. She ships off half of it to Regulus and Sirius using the Vanishing box without saying what it's for. Severus doesn't ask about the invisibility cloak McGonagall mentioned, and Lily doesn't offer. It stays in a mixing bowl under the sink. The horcrux stays in its bell-jar, charmed invisible in midair. The Beauxbatons poison passes from hand to hand, Severus is told, tested on an animal, a man, and then--a child, some nameless muggleborn. It does its work-- _ his _ work--their shared work. She tries not to think about it more than she has to. Her dreams are strange, sometimes violent. She brews the Draught for it but can't bare to take it, because the curious ciphers of James or Harry are sometimes there, and she is hungry for their faces. Sometimes Severus is in them, too, and that leaves her with an entirely different and infinitely stranger sense of loss. She begins work on another draught, one more cunning and stronger than dreamless sleep to help her if the memories threaten to take her mind. Her birthday comes and Sirius brings the cake himself, calls Severus a dementor to explain why it's chocolate even though he's living his life mostly as dog, and they eat and laugh together despite it all. The book hums in the bell-jar, above. Late that night, all the flowers in her room are completely changed--stargazer lilies in place of all the daisies, delicate bright orchids twisted their way up the bedpost--and when she blows out the candle the entire room is bathed in cold starlight radiating up from a Pensieve in the corner. There is no note, no memories inside waiting for her, but the purpose and giver are clear. The pensieve fills up with her dreams and she manages to sort the memories from the fictions, manages to reconstruct her dead husband's face in the bowl. The draught she has been working on in secret is effective enough to test on herself, and she spends one full day groggy but absolutely present, the memories of her past life locked away. Spells come back to her, over other days when the barrier between herself and her past is thinner; one to wrap a gift in ribbon and one to melt iron, one to grow the eyelashes and one to gag a prisoner, one clever and twisty charm Severus and she developed some late night in the middle of Fifth year to secretly record the goings-on in a room to parchment and another to clean and polish dirty dragonhide she is sure came from the noble house of Potter. She tries, sometimes, to remember loving James, turns over the idea of  _ love _ in her mind again and again, but it slips away like a handkerchief in a windstorm. And all the while, the horcrux sits in its bell jar, humming its tuneless tone.

The escape plan is made over many late nights with wine as the hard frost finally breaks and the barest breath of spring moves across England. It snows, still, but the snow is lighter, gentler, melting in occasional glimpses of sunlight. The earliest flowers emerge at the window-box. Their plans result in small bags stuffed with disguises, clothing, food, various currencies, everything they might need to run far and fast either alone or together. He doesn't like planning for  _ alone _ but he can hear the practicality in it. The bags are concealed, one tucked into Lily's boot, one strapped to Severus' belt. They make a Portkey of the wood inside of a twig covered in bark and hide that on their persons, too; if anything went terribly wrong, they could snap the twig and be at King's Cross before a cast spell could strike home.

The book is another matter. Basic hexes and curses, Regulus assures, will bounce right off of it; upon deeper inspection, even disguising its physical characteristics is a feat. It won't even turn red when Lily tries to Transfigure it into an apple, and Lily suspects it would come out of a poison bath smoking but unscathed. After numerous experiments--spread out over days so the thing does not wreak its vengeance on them--it becomes clear that any protections strong enough to hide it completely would inevitably draw attention in their own right. Early one morning, Lily wakes with the realization that  _ changing _ it is not the goal, and destroying it could be done, but the immediate task is merely hiding it. So she decides to put the book with the rest of the books: she hollows the inside of all the pages pages from a large volume--the third volume of  _ The Potion Master's Companion, _ due in part to the size and in part to the irony--casts a plain, fifth-year shield charm modified to stick around inside the created chamber to muffle the Dark magic within, uses a Sticking charm to hold the book together, and places it back on the shelf.

"All right. Tell me where the Horcrux is," she challenges Severus that evening, and despite going through every finding spell and Dark detection he can think of, he can't determine its location. He's almost pleased with her.

"You could have picked something less--" his hand gestures to the stack of sheets she has revealed in the bin, cut from the volume. "--useful."

"You barely need that and you know it. You just have it to show off and fill the shelves. Not as if there's any notes in it. I checked."

His displeasure does not change much. He looks as though he's swallowed a swarm of lacewing flies and they are still fighting. "I don't like it being here. It affected you."

"Is  _ that _ how you are writing off me being cross with you? Like I've never been cross with you except under the influence of Dark artifacts?" Her eyes narrow for a moment, but he isn't a spluttering boy and she isn't a schoolmarm. She shrugs. "Besides, it's not as if we can stow it somewhere  _ too _ hidden. We need to know where it is. We need to be able to snatch it up in a hurry, if we have to. It's there, on the top shelf, hidden as best we can. Can't Accio the thing itself but we can Accio  _ The Potion Master's Companion, Volume 3 _ and it'll come along for the ride. I've done a good job and you know it."

Severus purses his lips, but there's a smile hidden in the way the corners of his eyes move. Someone who knew him less would have missed it. "I suppose. It is a good hiding place, after all." His mouth twists. "We can always burn the house down with Fiendfyre if we are pressed. It might take the rest of Cokeworth with it, but that would be no great loss to the Dark Lord's empire."

Lily laughs, and Severus smirks at her laughter, and for the first moment in what feels like forever, things seem almost normal and not so messy and mixed up. She surges ahead, then. "And I've had another thought--we need to spar. I need the practice."

The line between his brows appears just as quickly as it left. "What?"

"The Dark Lord isn't just going to roll over and die without trouble," She twirls her wand between her fingertips. "I'm rusty."

"I'll hurt you."

It's her turn to look displeased. "You will, will you?"

"That's not--" he starts, backtreading.

"You think you can beat me? In a duel?"

"You haven't had your wand for three years--"

She thrusts her wand out to her side and up, scraping the tip along the bookcases and then twirling it around the room. A wave of shimmering purple light spreads from the book case, up the shelves, following her wand across the ceiling and below their feet on the floor, racing across the spines of the books, toppling a chair in its path behind her and slamming shut the door. It ends with her wand pointed straight at Severus. There's a fire in her gut and a grin on her lips.  " _ En garde,  _ you arrogant bastard."

He looks taken aback, but more than a little pleased. His wand appears instantly in his hand from where it was hidden up his sleeve. And they are back at Christmas, fifth year--before it had all gone wrong--when they had absconded to an abandoned classroom lined in empty stone bookshelves and shot hex after hex at each other. The rules are the same, and it doesn't even need to be spoken: no hexes or curses they couldn't lift themselves. Beyond that, no holds barred. "I'll try to go easy on you, Evans," he says archly.

She lets out a shriek, half at the insult, half of a laugh, and final half  _ Expelliarmus _ , dodging left as she does so to avoid his immediate and wordless retaliatory body-bind curse. He bats her spell away easily and lazily sends back a curse--either jelly-fingers or jelly-legs, she can't be sure--but she has used his lassitude to cast a loose variation on a sticking charm on her feet and hands and is using it, now to scale the bookcase rapidly. Over her shoulder, three quick  _ stupefy _ to keep him busy _ , _ and then she's hanging from the ceiling with the whole room at her disadvantage, red hair swinging like a flag. He dives for cover behind his desk, which she sets rattling with a volley of hexes until he aims a levitation charm to pluck her from her perch. Lily leaps from the ceiling to avoid the strike and is instantly and disconcertingly caught by gravity, landing clumsily on the chandelier with a leg and one arm. It tilts dizzyingly under her weight, but she is protected behind the crystal--any spell could be refracted, shifted, and aim is impossible for both of them. She swings on it while it creaks threateningly, swinging away from him and then toward him.

"I'm faster than you," she taunts, conjuring a flock of birds to pelt him. The crystal of the chandelier tinkles merrily as they dive through it towards their target.

Severus dispels them with a crack of lighting. "More reckless, you mean.  _ Ascendio-- _ " and he rises into the air, level with her, for the easier aim height will give.

Lily cries, " _ Ventus!" _ and while the winds buffet him back, she swings recklessly from the chandelier to a ladder. Her footing is off, though, and rather than landing on the ladder that goes to the highest shelves of the library, she falls past it, barely catching herself in time with a feather-fall charm. She whips around in time to see the body-bind curse flying at her from the ladder on the opposite side of the room, where Severus has been blown. Lily barely has time to squeak " _ Protego!" _ and it half fails; her right arm is locked to her side and her legs are locked together, but she's still upright--barely--against the ladder. Her left hand frees her wand from her stiff right hand, and casts fire--weak fire, from the wrong hand, but still fire--toward him. She knows he'll block it, and she also knows it will occupy him. The rug starts to smoke despite the ward.

"Cheating," Severus calls out, extinguishing it.

"I'm just using what is available," she replies, freeing herself from the hex, breathing hard. "Other people we fight might value their carpets." A reflecting charm, mirror-bright, unfolds and snaps into perfection in front of her, reflecting his next, and the one after. She trades the wand back to her right hand and begins to shape the spell, concave, to return and aim to return the spells thrown at her.

Severus narrows his eyes from across the room, steps aside to avoid his own reflected stunning spell, and then casts his own reflecting charm--but none appears before him. Lily only has enough time to look around, and finally up, just in time to see the full body bind screaming at her from an angled mirror behind her own reflecting charm.

He looks more than a little smug when he comes to free her, stepping lightly around her wavering reflecting charm. But he helps her up after releasing her. "Again?" she asks, eager.

"I thought you would have had enough."

"I forgot how hard reflecting charms are," she says, rotating her wand wrist and pressing her thumb along the tendon. "They always want to curl in. Got to pull them back around you if you want real defense."

"Harder to shape them to aim and return a spell," Severus replies. "The climbing trick was clever, though. The high ground is not to be underestimated." He looks around the room, eyes narrowed. "It is likely most of our battles will be indoors as well. You rely more on dodging than shielding at any rate, which is … safer."

The implication is clear, of course. No shield deflects the Killing Curse, and no guarantee their eventual opponents would not be trying to kill or permanently maim rather than trap or capture. She hadn't thought of that--or, if she had, it had been tucked deep in her muscle memory more than in her mind. "Hm." She rotates her wrist again, seeking for a stretch or a twinge, and doesn't ask what battles he's imagining. She can imagine them too. "Again?"

They go two more rounds, Severus winning out once more by sending her to sleep while she wrestled to control a conjured snake, and two further victories by Lily using a much improved reflecting charm and a deluge of water as a distraction. Severus is sopping wet and bemused and they are both panting by the end, but he concedes the victory.

"Did we ever--" Lily says, still breathless, freeing him from the chair she brought to life to imprison him. There's a memory that won't leave her and she has to expel it. "Did we ever fight? During the war? That trick, with the swarm of bats pinning me in a corner, that looked familiar. Like my birds, but spookier." She tries to toss it off, but nothing could ever be tossed off, nothing was ever casual, not between them. Every moment with Severus has a jar of foul spirits set aside to pickle in. She doesn't say, _I can't be sure if you were trying to kill me or protect me from the other masked murderers._ _I don't know if you knew, either. I think there was blood on your lips, and I think I put it there--_

He rises to his feet, drying himself with a gesture, looking--is that guilt? Only for a moment, but it shines in the dark of his half-lidded eyes all the same, like the reflection of something she can't see. Like he knows something she doesn't. If there's a tension in his shoulders, a rigidness to his back, it's hidden under robes--and she can imagine with a sudden vividness what that would look like, his spine sharp through the skin, the ribs she traced along his sides, the scars she knows about faded with time and others, surely, new ones that have been written on his skin since. Perhaps a few she has written herself. The twinge in her wrist sings again, and she flexes it again, digging into the tendon with a knuckle. 

"Perhaps," he allows, closing the meager distance between them, and her memory reaches back to a new moment, to his hands on her waist, and suddenly she is aware of just how close he is and what could be done with that space--or a lack of it--and her breath goes strange, quick as it ever was scaling the wall. "Let me see your wrist."

She presents it, tucking her wand away over an ear. He takes her hand by the palm in both of his fingertips, traces the veins, presses his thumbs to the tendons, then turns the palm over to run both thumbs over the back of her wrist.

"What do you see, fortune-teller?" she says, her voice pitched low to tease. Instead it comes out with husky intimacy.

His fingertips stop, cold and calloused on the inside of her wrist. "You broke your wrist and wouldn't let me heal it." A breath, and then: "Before."

And in an instant, the closeness--that strange excitement--is completely dispelled. She doesn't ask how she broke it. It doesn't really matter. The only thing that matters is the why, she supposes, and they both know the answer to that, and she doesn't care to tread that disturbed earth yet again. She folds her free hand over his, taking her fingertips. "It's fine. Just a twinge."

He stops, but she doesn't release his hands from hers. Her wrist still aches. And then it comes to her. "Does Bellatrix still fight?"

His nose wrinkles at her name. "Not anymore."

"But she must have some cursed wounds, right? Something we gave her, in the war?"

"If you mean the Order, they didn't much care for cursing until the end, and the Cruciatus Curse does not leave any physical marks. Those are her great wounds." He chews on it for a moment, fingers loosening on her wrist as he thinks. "She's Fenrir's ward. I suppose she may have picked up some from him in her more spirited moments."

"There's no way that bloody-minded carnivore is half the healer you are. Or I am." She takes her hands back from his and turns to pace. 

He tucks his hands away into his pockets, as if startled he has been holding her hand for so long and wishes to hide the evidence. He follows her pacing with his eyes in silence while she worries at the idea.

Lily pauses at the end of a lap, speaking to the far wall of books. "Doesn't  _ he _ want her back? As a fighter, as part of the army?" She turns to look at his face and make her way back to him.

"I believe he has hopes for that, though they diminish with every year that passes." He stays put, watching her restless progress across the room so he doesn't have to shout. "Bellatrix's connection with the Dark Lord has always been…. uniquely close."

"All right. All right." She passes him, goes to the opposite wall, strokes the spine of a volume absently. "She hasn't fought since she was captured and tortured, then. Has anyone tried to heal her? Put her back in service? I imagine she's just itching to get back on the front lines."

Severus gestures vaguely. "A few tried to heal her, after it happened. A team from St Mungos, then healers of a Darker sort who were…. less worried about the sources and side-effects of their cures. None were truly successful and Bellatrix did not thank them for their efforts. It became clear it was useless, I suppose. I myself tried to brew something, but found it ineffective. But that was before she became Fenrir's ward, when the Dark Lord still had hopes for her recovery."

Lily spins on her heel, continuing her path back across the room and giving Severus a hard look as she passes him again. "And now?"

"Now, she is a burden on anyone foolish enough to invite her into their home. Fenrir is little better."

She pauses in the center of the room, gazing up at the chandelier. "Is she ever away from the werewolf?"

His thoughtful frown twists into momentary disgust. "I believe dealing with the children of Beauxbatons in the near future is his reward for minding Bellatrix. He is slated for France, I think, delivering--supplies. Vanishing cabinets, weapons, spare wands, invisibility cloaks."

"Who's going to mind her, then? The Malfoys?"

He snorts. "Likely. No one else will step forward, though I'm sure Lucius would prefer to have her gone. Without Fenrir to monitor her, she is even less pliant and more destructive than usual. Once France is fully taken, he will likely send her there with Fenrir, to haunt some disused estate."

She turns toward him. The morning light strikes the chandeir, casting scattered rainbows on the far all. "So we have to do it now."

He recoils, clearly fearful he's given her something dangerous. "Do what, precisely?"

"You're going to volunteer to babysit--to try to cure her, make her well enough to travel, to fight in France rather than just be sent to pasture there." She closes the steps between them as she speaks, seizes his shoulders, thrilled and horrified by turns. "That's how we get the cup. We take her in and try to heal her."


	14. Things Unsaid

It is an understatement to say that Severus does not like Lily's plan.

When they bring it to the Black brothers that afternoon, for a meeting long planned to discuss this very matter, Regulus laughs. He then expresses a profane and visceral revulsion it once he realizes it is not a joke. Sirius doesn't like it either, not even when she fleshes it out, no matter how enticingly reckless and temptingly destructive she suggests its turns could become.

"This has none of the qualities we required from a plan. There was no structure to it, no failsafes, no escape routes that leave us unscathed and covers intact should it all fall apart. It's barely a plan at all," Regulus rages. He's been going on for minutes like this, and showing no sign of stopping. All things told, Lily takes this as a good sign--for what little she knows of Regulus, he rages for as long as he has to and then collapses, spent, into the arms of inevitability. And for all its faults, something must be done to prevent the cup from leaving the country with Bellatrix.

"It's more creating of a window of opportunity than a plan," she admits.

"You're mad," Sirius says, sounding more awed than dismissive.

Running into the gap Regulus has left for the first time in what feels like forever, she barrels forward, standing. "I've already run it through. She comes--you said a week, right Sev?--we start a week-long treatment course. I've got an idea for what, too. The the standard course from St Mungos for psychic trauma, and I've almost done working on another one that should be able to block visions, memories--that's the real treatment. It's like drinkable Occlumency, almost. Not as good as the real thing, not able to be controlled so well, but I think I'm quite close."

"An experimental potion! Of course! Should I have expected otherwise? Dare I ask how long you have been working on this? And who have you been testing this experiment on?" Regulus says, with a shrill little laugh.

She spreads her hand across her chest. "Myself, naturally."

Regulus and Sirius are both gawping like fish and for all their differences they look like brothers in this moment. No one is looking at Severus except Lily, so she is the only one who sees him start and narrow his eyes at her--not in cold fury so much as confusion, as if squinting could render her more clear. He grips his chair tighter, knuckles flashing white.

With their full attention, she continues. "I started working on it weeks ago. Figured it would be useful to put up blocks, and it might help stem the flow of memories while my memory charm breaks down. I don't much like the stuff but the detections say all the right things, and I'll take it in place of madness if that's what it comes down to." She doesn't say,  _ I am willing to bet Bellatrix would too. _

"I still think the House of Gaunt bears--" Regulus starts in, at the same time a Sirius says, "What side effects--"

Lily holds up her hands and speaks over both, deciding to address Sirius as he, perplexingly, shares Severus' clear concern. "It makes you a bit stupid and sleepy, but it anchors you to the present moment well enough. It's based on Dreamless Sleep, actually, because if you can block dreams--"

Severus is clearly following the logic of the potion and Sirius looks troubled, but Regulus interrupts, voice pitching louder still. "The House of Gaunt bears greater inspection. The lineage traces itself all the way back to the Peverells and the Founders of Hogwarts, which means the number of artifacts are too many to name and too many to trace, all of which will need--"

Lily bangs a fist on the table to silence him. "It doesn't matter if we find the Dark Lord's baby socks fallen behind the Moldy Chest of Drawers of Gaunt. If we lose control of the cup, if she's hidden away out of the country on some Unplottable farm on the continent, it's all for naught. This is the only plan fast enough, and it can be done while maintaining our covers."

She doesn't say,  _ and it gives Severus work that isn't murdering innocent children. _ She has learned not to say a great many things, living alongside Severus all these years. In another time, another life, it all might have come spilling out, but here--she tucks this and many other thoughts down below her tongue like so much tasteless chewing gum.

"It only works if you survive it," Sirius mutters. "Listen, Lily, I know once you've set your mind to something you're like to follow through on it, but--what happens if you actually succeed? If you actually do make her better?"

She avoids Severus' gaze as it needles her. That was his concern, too, and she doesn't need to make a point of himself and the elder Black son agreeing. She shrugs and tosses her hair over her shoulder. "Then she gets sent to the front lines, where hopefully someone rips her guts out."

It doesn't bolster her in the least that all of them look unconvinced, and a bit queasy besides, at the prospect of a healthy Bellatrix in her prime.

The planning happens around her, by the two men more familiar with the outside world and the world Bellatrix belongs to, both of whom despise the very thought even as they shape it into reality. The Dark Lord cares where she stays, cares--Severus assumes, and she agrees--where the cup is allowed to stay, at least. But Severus has been a diligent servant, and has become an innovative healer over those years of service. It tastes bitter but it's true, and if anyone is permitted to take Bellatrix in order to heal her, it would be him. It's not as if she's useful to the Dark Lord as anything but a guard dog after those long weeks with the Longbottoms. Sometimes she can achieve a frenetic kind of action when her routine was disrupted, or when a vision or a paranoid thought was there to be ferreted out--how Lily had seen her at the Manor--but more often she is slackjawed, recalcitrant, a silent vengeful ghost stalking a world she has relished to crafting with violence but now has no sense of how to live inside of.

"I almost pity her," Lily says, offhand, while she washes up from their dinner late that night, after the brothers are gone. Her wand spins in lazy circles, and bubbles swirl down the sink. "Was she like that before?"

"Whether this is a change of her nature due to the torture or intrinsic to her character is besides the point." Severus despises it entirely, and has made no secret of it, so the pinched mouth and dour tone coming from the slouching figure against the far wall is no surprise. "Since her torture at the hands of the Longbottoms, she had not been given any task, any mission, and no matter how fervently she worked to serve her paranoia. Everything she brought to the Dark Lord has been largely ignored for some time, and all of it filtered through Fenrir Greyback."

"Because it sounds like nattering of a madwoman, likely enough," Lily says, drying a plate with a towel. "Has anything she's seen been proved out?"

"Some, to a degree. But never precisely in the way she believes it. Everything is a threat to be destroyed to her, which makes it difficult to suss out the truth of a vision." He pauses. "There is a spell that could act as a final safeguard, the  _ conpartior lux _ \--"

"No," Lily interrupts.

"Will you  _ listen?  _ The life force of two or more wizards can be entangled, it allows one wizard to wield the power of both in battle, and it allows one at the brink of death to be sustained by the other for exponentially longer than they might survive otherwise-- _ " _

"That's Dark if I've ever heard of it."

"The Dark Arts are simply tools--"

"--tools that will not be used to protect me, Sev,  _ no. _ You can do whatever you are going to behind closed doors, heaven knows I can't stop you from doing that, but you won't get my participation. The cost is too high. The recoil too great. I know what you look like after you've gone to some great conjuring at the Dark Lord's bidding, and if you want to tell me this spell is easy I'll know you're lying. I know enough about the Dark Arts to know that. There's no use in sharing power if you're weakened by it and Bellatrix might notice a change. It's too risky."

His face twists. This rejection hurts him, even as it spares him pain. "If you lay dying at Bellatrix's feet, you would not even siphon off the merest moments of my life to keep your own self alive? You are helpless without your wand."

"I can handle her with or without a wand." Lily thrusts her chin toward him defiantly.

Severus' eyes flash. "Arrogance and naivete. I have seen the woman burn a muggleborn servant alive for the insolence of speaking in her presence."

She rolls her eyes as she turns to put the plate away, not giving him the satisfaction of her horror. "They I won't  _ talk _ ."

He's on more familiar ground, here. "No, you'll simply steal her most prized possession out from under her nose, will you?"

She gestures with a fork still wet from the rinse. "You're angry." A few droplets of water fly from the tines. "Because you're scared. I'm not afraid of you and I'm not afraid of Bellatrix Black."

He looks mutinous, flushed and more furious than ever, his mouth a severe thin line below his hooked nose. "You should be."

She would rather it sounded less like a threat, but she controls her temper. She puts the fork down and rounds the table to where he stands. He'd look frightening to a child, perhaps, or if he hadn't cut himself shaving on his adam's apple just below where his collar is buttoned to, or if there weren't a persistent lock of stringy hair fluttering in his face and moving with his blustering rapid breath. Lily absent-mindedly reaches out, tucks the lock of hair back behind his ear with the rest. "Do you trust me?"

"I trust myself," he snaps, utterly unsoothed by her touch. "If she tries to hurt you, I won't be responsible for what I do."

Her eyebrows shoot up. "Don't lay your tactics at my feet."

He rises from his position at the wall, and makes her feel his full height. "You can't mean that."

"You know as well as I do that she'll likely have a go at me, and that's a risk I'm willing to take. Maybe put me under the Cruciatus, maybe she'll break some bones, who knows. I've broken bones before. You can fix those. But if you interfere too much, everything we've done is worthless." She narrows her eyes. "What, were you planning to kill her the first time she laid a finger on me? How were you planning on getting away with  _ that? _ "

He doesn't answer her question, just turns an uglier flush atop his pallor. "You ask me to listen to you scream in agony and do nothing?"

Lily grinds her teeth. "I'm not asking you to do nothing. I'm asking you to  _ do your part. _ Treat me like what I am. Protect me the same way you'd protect--the carpets in the library."

For once, he doesn't try to storm out and start shouting. Sugaring the facts with the memory of the wild, free morning has done the trick. He steadies himself against the table, jaw working, glaring at his splayed hands on the tabletop.

She lays one gentle hand atop his, pushing down the cruel whisper of a thought that he would likely rather she stayed just as docile and  _ his _ as the carpets while the world outside spun on. But he belongs to her just as much as she belongs to him, now, each in the power of the other utterly. And he can't deny her what she wants. His guilt is too great--almost as great as his care for her. She sees it clearly, now, the thread of a strange sort of love, stitching in the seams of every gentleness given, every touch to her hand, and every fit of rage that has sent him storming from a room. She does not wish to pull at the string that holds him together, and so Lily tries to be kind as she can. 

"Bellatrix is a stepping stone to the real fight. Nothing more. And getting to the real fight is all that matters."

"It's not," he mutters, sounding like a petulant child being forced to swallow a thick and bitter medicine.

Her hand closes on his, peeling up his stiff fingers and curling around them in fierce, almost cruel insistence. "Yes. It is."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIVIA: the working / joke title of this chapter is "wtf lily this plan sux" and the working / joke title of all the subsequent Bellatrix chapters was just "shit shit shit shit SHIT SHIT SHIT SHIT"


	15. Bellatrix I

Bellatrix is smaller than Lily thought she would be.

Lily watches from beneath her lashes as Bellatrix sidles into the front hall after a push over the threshold from Fenrir, tip of her tongue protruding from the corner of her mouth. She's slight, light-boned, swallowed up in an overlarge cloak and crested with a dark and wild mass of hair that reminds her uncomfortably of Sirius'--and pretty in the same way as he, with that same fine pureblood nose and sallow complexion given to dark purple rings below the eyes. She scans the room, Severus, Lily standing behind him, the banister, the ceiling, the doors, the windows, weighing each equally--seeing, if Lily understands the principles of this woman at all, escape routes and weapons in service violence just waiting to burst free of her limbs.

Lily suddenly wonders what she will see in the library--if Bellatrix, too, would climb to the ceiling for the high ground. The thought makes her skin crawl.

Severus steps forward, gives Bellatrix a curt nod that she doesn't acknowledge, and then moves past her to have a brief murmured conversation with Fenrir. Bellatrix, with her off sloping and indirect limp, is creeping steadily closer to Lily. A light valise--blue patterned in white flowers--is set inside the door, and then it closes. It's for Lily to take the valise but with Bellatrix focused on her and prowling ever-closer she knows better than to move. The distance is quite short now, and Lily hopes Bellatrix can't hear her heart hammering. She hears, more than sees, Severus turn with a swish of robes.

"There's something here," Bellatrix mutters. Then she darts forward, inches from Lily's face, rank breath in Lily's nose, hands clawed and ready to tear at her--

Behind Bellatrix's back, Severus looses his wand in his hand, ready to strike, and Lily holds her breath and thinks as loudly as she can, _no no no_ _it can't go wrong this quickly--_

Bellatrix licks her thumb and tries to scrub a freckle from her cheek with spit. "Filthy," she murmurs, almost tenderly. "Absolutely filthy." 

Lily has been a fighter, never a spy, and she feels the gulf between these roles acutely now. Lily keeps her eyes down and marshals her breath, counting slowly up to seven and then back down to keep the surge of panic under control--a battle tactic, and isn't this a battle? 

There's half a breath of consideration, and then the wand disappears up Severus' sleeve once more. "Bellatrix," he says steadily, tone bland but clear. "Would you like to come upstairs with me to begin your treatment."

She ignores him, still hovering close to Lily's face, thumb still scrubbing. "There's something here."

"That is my servant." No names. Names are for people. No need to draw attention to the past of their relationship with anything so trivial as a name.

Bellatrix finally spares a glance over her shoulder. "There's something here," she whispers again. "Something." Her thumb pushes harder and her nails dig into Lily's cheek. The rub becomes a pinch, a shake of her head that is less affectionate grandmother and more rat terrier snapping the neck of its prey, and then she's free. Bellatrix points at Severus, and then at Lily. Her voice is singsong. "Something nobody knows about. How many babies have you given her, Severus? How many have you taken from her breast?"

Lily doesn't dare let her breath catch. She is counting: one-two-Harry--

As if she's heard Lily trip inside her own mind, Bellatrix's sudden laughter spirals up out of her, wild and free, like a swarm of bats startled from the cave of her mouth. "Just the one?"

All the air has gone from the room. Lily is trying to breathe to the count of seven but can't bring air into her lungs. A hand of loss is strangling her, a thing she has never felt so dearly as now _. _ It is terrifying to see the blazing thing between them, the light and the dark of it, so clearly rendered in the enemy's eyes.

Severus comes to her side, then, eyes flicking over her cheek the same way he would inspect the carpet after Sirius shook soot over it from the Floo. It's the right thing, it's even the thing she asked him for, but her stomach clenches with the lack of care in his eyes as he turns them back to Bellatrix. "Are you entirely finished?"

Her tongue lolls out of her mouth grotesquely, and she sags away from Lily. Severus seizes Bellatrix's arm as much to keep her from coming closer to him as to pilot her up the stairs. She becomes almost pliant with his hand guiding her, though, and he doesn't spare a backward look.

Upstairs, Lily knows everything is prepared; a bedroom done up in soothing blues, sheets ironed crisp and pulled tight into hospital corners, an orderly row of potions ready for consumption that should knock her down within a half-hour. And as far as first meetings go, this has been less than disastrous. But Bellatrix is looking for something-- _ seeing _ something--and it's a problem Lily has to tease apart alone while Severus does the work of managing her upstairs.

She and Severus have warded the kitchen together, her with everything she can remember from protecting people for the Order and he, with darker things--one even that required a vial of blood from each of them, if that tells her anything about its nature. But she can't argue with the results, and it's not the mad  _ conpatior lux _ he had tried to persuade her of before. The door will be locked to any touch but her own or Severus', and all sound will be muffled. It's a safe place, one she won't likely think to go, and her wand is tucked into a drawer with the spatulas.

They have falsified cups, made from Severus' and Regulus' memories of the thing teased out in Lily's pensieve from remembered glances. Sometimes it is drawn from a pocket, sometimes it dangles from a thin gold chain, but it is always  _ there, _ and on close inspection it is leafed in gold that will take enchantment where the horcrux will not, and this is the thing they have made, carefully crafted and then duplicated dozens of times. The false cups are hidden everywhere, spelled invisible until the center of the base is tapped with a finger. Even without her wand, given a free hand, a fingertip, Lilly can activate them--and find them blindfolded, which she did for Severus if only to get him to shut it.

Her cheek is stinging where Bellatrix has roughed it, and the reflection in the bottom of a plate tells her that there's small red welts where her fingernails dug in. She doesn't bother with it. Lily busies herself with dinner, with cleaning, the washing--all her usual duties from before, done the long way around. It's almost comforting to let her mind go blank and polish silver.

The clock on the wall ticks away an hour, and then two before Severus comes to the kitchen. He looks ready to break something--she considers offering him a plate to throw against the wall, no one will hear it--but instead he merely shuts the door behind him and grinds his teeth. "This plan was idiotic from the start."

"She's fun," Lily says brightly.

He scowls, reknitting the wards behind him.

"I mean it. She's shaking things up. It's good practice for what's to come, if we're to stay under cover. It won't get easier from here, you know. Do you hate me a little for dreaming this up?"

"Have you always been so rash?"

"Probably. Will you heal this or shall I sport it?" she asks, gesturing to the crescents on her cheek, using them as an olive branch--letting him decide, for once. "I don't dare take out my wand for something so small and she might want to see her handiwork."

"She would," he says, contempt staining his voice. "I do not intend to give her the satisfaction." His wand-tip presses to her cheek and the half-moons seal back into her own skin.

Neither of them sight the cup that first day. Despite a regimen of potions that would knock a normal witch off her block and into a deep and dreamless sleep for 23 hours of the day, Bellatrix is a restless soul who fights everything they give her. Severus has always been a bad sleeper who seemed to subsist entirely on air and resentment in their youth and hasn't changed his habits, but Lily is not so resilient and by the third day is worn to a nub. 

They meet in the kitchen whenever they can, when Bellatrix finally beds down or goes slack and silent curled in a chair in the library below the quiet threat of the horcrux she can't hear above. Severus bears the brunt of dealing with the monster, and Lily knows he hates her a little for forcing him into contact with the beast. Lily, in turn, tries to be kind, to give the sort of kindness he will accept without being galled by it. He cannot stand charity, but he can stand kindness, properly served. When Bellatrix chases shadows like a mad dog at three in the morning, shoving her sharply into wall, she goes to him in his laboratory and lets him look her over and heal the inconsequential bruises. When she serves meals, she only serves Bellatrix the perfectly turned omelettes; she doesn't press food onto him. When he comes to the kitchen later, the biscuits and half a sandwich on the counter are haphazard, an afterthought, something he can snatch while her back is turned to help him feel as if he doesn't need her help, as if she is an accident.

The days start to blur. She falls asleep in the kitchen folding napkins and Severus wakes her with an ungentle shake. Every time Bellatrix passes her in a hall, every time she enters the room, Lily targets the nearest invisible false cup, and every time she doesn't sight the real thing.

In the kitchen, on the afternoon of the fourth day, Lily is almost at her breaking point. When Severus enters, there's nothing kind in her left to give, just a panic gone dull with days of use, gray as her polishing cloth. "We are running out of time."

"I know," he says, voice tight.

"I'm getting clumsy. I almost let this roll in the hall because I dropped it. It slipped right out of my fingers. I thought--" Her extended hand looks empty, but Severus lets his hand fall over hers and his fingertips curl around the invisible figure of a cup, brushing her palm as it does so. She sighs, scrubbing her face. "This idea is rubbish and we're no closer."

He doesn't say  _ I told you so. _ He never says anything aloud he could convey with a look.

Lily isn't done chewing on the problem. "She's too defensive. She knows how valuable--"

A knock comes. For a wild moment, neither she nor Severus know how to answer the intrusion in their closest space. Then Lily looses her braid. "Come here," she says, shimmying onto the table.

"What--"

She musses her hair and shoves her skirts up around her hips. "She already thinks you--you know."

He at least has the decency to color slightly. "You can't mean--"

Lily repositions, pulling her skirts higher, and grabs the front of his robes to drag him closer. "She's suspicious. The  _ implication _ will help, I think. It will seem like the secret she's looking for. Exposing you in a vulnerable moment might help her feel like she has the power, might make her relax enough to let us even see the thing. Maybe she'll even start  _ sleeping _ at night, god willing. Spying fundamentals, you have to give something that seems useful to get anything that can be useful." She lets her knees go wide to accommodate his still-clothed body between them, starts to push at his shirt, to undo a few buttons and rumple his robes suggestively. She keeps whispering, the fear and exhaustion making her giddy, "And you know, if you've never shagged on a kitchen table, let me tell you, you've absolutely got to try it. If the table's just the right height, you can really--" She stops, catching his eyes, catching her hands on his chest. More than all of Bellatrix's implied violence, all of her skittering paranoia, all of the tenuous plans they intend to execute, nothing thrills and scares her as much as the vicious hunger that passes through his eyes as she touches him, playing at being caught in the act. Then he blinks, and it's gone, swallowed up in the dark.

His hands encircle her wrists, pulling them away from his chest. "That's enough," he says, and if there's a roughness to it, it's not for her to ask after. He peels back the wards and she smooths her hands down her bare thighs, eyes to her knees, as if she has been caught in the midst of something shameful and intimate.

Hasn't she?

"Bellatrix," he says at the door, voice all silk and smoothness. "You should be convalescing in bed."

She peers in from the doorway, leering. "Shouldn't you as well?" she asks, voice so quiet there is no inflection there to read.

"That is none of your concern."

Bellatrix leans close to him, to where she has unbuttoned his shirt just past the collarbone. Her fingers go white where they clutch the doorframe to hang her body through it, and her eyes roll up so she can keep her gaze on his face. She whispers conspiratorially, "Do you make her beg for it?"

In their youth, of course, there had been all sorts of vile implications about the nature of their relationship. But they were children, and the idea had been laughed off or hexed away, and then it was gone once they were old enough for it to carry water. Now the figure filling the doorframe is a fully grown man with power, with respect, with the Dark Lord's mark on his arm, and she, a widow, a mother, has been relegated to only liminal humanity. The suggestion fills the room with concrete. Because he  _ could, _ and Lily has only just understood the weight of it on the lips of an enemy.

At the door, Severus doesn't move--probably fixing her with that abyssal glare Lily herself is familiar with. Bellatrix stares back, but her eyes won't stop flickering to Lily, who can feel a flush crawling like an insect up her throat.

"I am making an effort to heal you," he says finally, voice quiet and low and cold enough to frost the windowpanes. "For the Dark Lord. For some reason, he continues to value your presence in his army."

"It's not as if nobody  _ knows-- _ " Bellatrix starts, as if stung.

"Do not concern yourself with things that are  _ not yours, _ Bellatrix, lest my desire to heal you wane." He doesn't slam the door so much as shut it with an inexorable force. Bellatrix moves her fingertips out of the way at the last moment.

He stands, facing the closed door and away from her for long breaths, rebuttoning his shirt, smoothing his robes, undoing her work upon him. Lily watches the hunch of his shoulders, and is surprised that a glass hasn't shattered its cupboard by all his repressed loathing at what has just transpired.

She clears her throat. "It also serves to explain why the kitchen is so heavily--"

" _ Don't. _ " His voice is a plume of smoke over a slow-burning fury, a coal mine that has caught and won't stop smoldering deep in the cracks of the earth.

"You saw her looking. She thinks she's won something."

He says nothing. He won't even turn to look at her.

"It cost us nothing." But even as it comes out of her mouth, she knows it for a lie.


	16. Bellatrix II

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Minor courtesy warning which I invite you to skip if you don't like spoilery warnings: 
> 
> There is some blood in this & next chapter. I have no idea what "graphic" means when we talk about violence anymore and I'm not the MPAA so I'm not using the tag, but if you're very squeamish, you may wish to brace yourself.

It is two in the morning, technically the sixth day and next-to-last day of Bellatrix's stay, and Lily would give her wand arm for a full 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep. But after an hour of fitful dreaming, the bell pull above her bed begins to sound, and she is roused to Bellatrix's side again. A glass of water, a new blanket, a basin to wash her face in, sometimes nothing but a moody and unsure glare for long and horrible minutes before being dismissed with a flick of her fingers; something new is happening inside of Bellatrix and it isn't making anything easier.

The part of the previous afternoon's ingenious little spur-of-the-moment idea executed on the kitchen table, the idea that has Severus unable to even so much as look at her, the idea that was supposed to make the beast sleep through the night so  _ they _ can as well--it hasn't worked. That much is clear. She seems truly, dreadfully present, untroubled by nightmares or visions--Lily's potion, she hopes--but it isn't making her  _ pleasant. _ If anything, she's more demanding on them both. She has sped through all their stores of pain relief potion and drinks it fast as Severus can brew. At the bottom of every curtsy, Lily has to will herself back up from collapsing to the floor.

Lily isn't even sure she can account for her hours anymore. By dawn, she is a shambling thing, half-dead with effort and anger and anxiety. Tomorrow morning Bellatrix will be gone with the cup. In the kitchen, she is burning her third attempt at a perfectly turned omelette for Bellatrix's repast when the pull chimes yet again. She doesn't have the energy to do much more than turn off the hob and go to Bellatrix's bedside.

Lily never makes it to the bedroom. She is too blind drunk with exhaustion to see it until she has been hit, and she is already on her way to the floor. Her mind is only surprised-- _ oh, I'm falling. _

Impact with the floor fires adrenaline into her blood. From the floor, she assesses like the soldier she is: head ringing, elbow bruised, a foot pressing on her back that could snap ribs if Bellatrix didn't weigh less than a child. But the spell hits, and Lily is reminded of the real power. The pain sears through her lightning-quick, a fire that licks at all her nerves and burns away her exhaustion in an instant in favor of a boneless sensation, like she has just run an incredible distance. All her instincts, ingrained from muscle memory of battle, have her reaching for a wand that isn't there.

There is something else, though. A cup, perched invisible just above her her head. She pushes herself onto her hands, reaches for the top of the long credenza, feels the cup there between her fingertips--

Agony. Lily can't help but cry out.

(Some distant part of her imagines Severus, likely in his laboratory, stirring away at something vile. Does the sound slither in beneath the heavy wooden door? Will a scream?)

Bellatrix leans close. "Filth," she says fondly, lifting Lily's body into the air with her wand and rotating her face to the ceiling. "At first I wasn't sure it was in you. I had to keep calling you back to see again and again, but now I'm sure of it. There's a light inside of you."

Lily floats, limp, eyes slitted to appear closed, into the bedroom. Her hands drag on the floor, the right one curled upward to the ceiling, carrying an invisible passenger. The door doesn't click shut behind them; good. Help is an option. Rescue is an option. She has to believe he will hear if she screams. Above her, Bellatrix's face comes into sudden focus, and Lily is dropped three feet to the floor. All the air comes out of her, and she gasps, eyes rushing back open. The invisible thing rocks in her palm, and rolls-- _ no-- _ away from her body, toward Bellatrix's foot.

Bellatrix's hair is wild, cascading down to shroud her face, tendrils brushing like insect antennae across Lily's cheeks as she inspects her prize. 

"We're not allowed to touch you," Bellatrix says. "Oh, we could take off something--arms, legs, tongue, you could live on without them--but we're not allowed to touch your heart." Bellatrix's knees fold beneath her and she crouches to her side, leaning across her body. "But you will do fine without this, you don't need this--"

Bellatrix's wand skates along the fabric covering Lily's left shoulder and it parts along with the skin beneath, blossoming open like a flower. She bites her lip at first, but the second stroke cuts deeper and Lily lets out a low, tremulous sound from deep in her gut.  _ She's going to take off my arm, I don't know if even Severus and I can regrow a whole arm-- _

But the arm doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is the cup _. _ And she's ready for this, she has trained for this, they have both worked toward this. Lily builds the box, mind vibrating, as Bellatrix touches her wand-tip to her left hip, splitting it open as well. The pain is distant, meaningless, unstoppable but unimportant, it burns but the burning is somewhere else, happening to a body that Lily has nothing to do with, a body that perhaps is screaming, perhaps sobbing, somewhere in another room of the house. Her right arm spasms in pain as the other is held, almost involuntary but not undirected, sweeping across the floor once, twice, striking something, grasping it--

"You stink like him," Bellatrix whispers into Lily's ear, digging the wand into the pit of her left elbow. Lily faintly imagines she can hear it click against bone. "You stink like  _ traitor. _ " Her eyes are rolling wildly, almost all white, then beetle-dark and piercing again, then white. "Three deaths he gave you, the marriage bed, the bassinet--but  _ oh,  _ you know about that! But not the third, not the third!" 

Lily's breath is fast and faster and then still, completely still, held. Her toes curl.

Bellatrix makes a sound that is not quite a laugh in her ear, harsh and mirthless. "The third death is yet to come. I can see it written in the air between you in lightning. He will give it to you. You will betray yourself. You already have."

The wand disappears from the crook of her elbow. She tries not to close her eyes, tries not to cringe as she finds a new spot in the left shoulder again, searing, but she cannot help but squirm. And then, glittering gold as hope, Bellatrix leans forward to touch at her hip once more, and the cup shines inside of her robes, dangling on a thin gold chain.

Lily can't help but stare at the thing. And Bellatrix, of course, follows the stare--and she slowly reaches in, pulling it away from her chest, snapping the chain with almost casual lack of concern. With a speed that such a frail creature shouldn't be able to muster, Bellatrix crushes it to the side of Lily's face. Her teeth bite into her right cheek as Bellatrix grinds it there. Lily tastes blood.

"The light," Bellatrix whispers, perplexed.

Something warm and thick and wet is dripping down Lily's side. She doesn't think about it. The hum of the cup so close to her face feels like its own scream.

Bellatrix rises to her feet and begins to move around Lily's body, and next to Lily's ear, the cup, the  _ real cup _ , hits the floor and begins to roll, revolving once before stopping on its handle.

"How--" The wand prods again, more frantic this time, as if searching for something embedded beneath her skin. A new slice, almost an accident, more haphazard than the butcher's precision of earlier, opens along her collarbone, skimming her flesh. Lily thrashes as best she can. Her right arm spasms, and she leaves it next to her face, next to the cup, fingers still curled. If Bellatrix will just turn away--

"Bellatrix," a soft and deadly voice murmurs from the door. "I'll ask you to leave my servant alive." Severus entered the room slowly, almost lazily, glancing at the body on the floor with distaste under an unconcerned brow. He doesn't even have his wand out.

_ He can do this, _ she thinks, and a strange thrill of joy shoots through her despite the blood in her mouth.  _ He can do it.  _ Her fingertips twitch, careful, so careful--

Bellatrix's face is pointed at Severus, focused down to the flat and impassive plane of his mouth as it speaks to her again, but from beneath Bellatrix's chin Lily can see her lips twist, and so does her wand, digging into Lily's shoulder once more to prove her point. She spasms again, right arm flinging back to her side, to her skirt, the pocket. "We're just having fun, aren't we, girl?"

"All the same," Severus says, folding his arms across his chest. Only Lily would notice the half-moment where his knuckles flash white.

Bellatrix narrows her eyes, and for a moment seems as though she plans to argue. "No one ever told me," she pouts. She lunges, clawed hand flashing past Lily's face again, and Lily can't stop herself cringing, but Bellatrix doesn't even bother ripping at her once more--she just snatches up the cup from where it lays next to Lily's face. It disappears into her robes. Then she takes one shuffling step backward. Another. A third. There's the sound of a body collapsing a velvet armchair next to the bed.

Lily lies there and breathes, for a moment. Severus' soft footfalls come to her side but he doesn't bend or move. The part must, still, be played. The audience is still watching. Very well; to the part, then. Lily levers herself up carefully on her right hand, feeling all the wounds she has sustained shift, all the lines along which she could split further. The first leg she tries isn't steady, but the second goes under her well enough and she comes to her feet next to Severus under her own power. Barely.

He wraps a hand around the back of her neck, fingertips feather-light beneath her collar to drag her round. "I will escort you to the kitchen," he says coldly, in a tone that says,  _ I hope this is what you wanted. _

Bellatrix watches them leave, knees drawn up to her teeth.

Silent, moving to the kitchens, Lily tries not to grab to the walls to steady herself. She's still bleeding. There seems to be rather a lot of red in the trail they leave. Severus puts a ungentle hand on her right shoulder when she sags dangerously on the stair. His fingertips squeeze too hard for it to be called kindness, but it is comfort, the only kind he knows how to give--too fierce by half, but she understands it. She resists the urge to comfort him in return, to put her hand atop his. There are a million reasons why she can't. And worse, it would make his guilt fester into something darker.

The kitchen is still full of steam, and Lily sways like a prizefighter once Severus releases her to close the wards around them. She manages to climb atop the table and sit there, the room moving sluggishly around her and full of heat. Blood crawls down her leg beneath her skirt.

When he comes to her, his face is less guarded, but no less frightening. He doesn't speak--if she had to hazard a guess, it's because he doesn't trust himself to. His wand skates over her hip, beginning to close the wounds she has suffered, and then up to her shoulder, though the instant his wand drifts the cuts open once more and begin to weep. It hurts, the knitting-back-together, tearing-back-apart. She catches his wrist, mid-pass and looks up at him from under her lashes, and--drunk on power, drunk on her own audacity--presses a kiss to the inside of his wrist where the veins show blue beneath his skin. It leaves a bloody imprint entirely unlike lipstick, in the shape of the parting of her lips. Her mouth stretches into what she is sure is a ghastly, blood-soaked grin, full of the pleasure of finally  _ doing something _ . Its an echo of previous defiance, of a kind of pain and victory she has known before coming back to her from a past that was stolen. A hoarse sound, half-laugh, half-cough, emerges unbidden from her throat.

"It's done."

  
From her skirt, she lifts her prize from a pocket--the cup, dangling from a fingertip, like a Christmas ornament, brilliant and golden and evil and real and  _ theirs _ .


	17. Bellatrix III

Severus recoils, his focus on her wounds momentarily abandoned. "Is that--"

"It's the real thing."

"How?"

"She's an idiot."

His confusion and horror float in and out of focus. She feels drunk on pain.

"She showed it off. Said something about  _ the light. _ I grabbed the fake from the credenza in the hall before she dragged me into the room. When you came in, you distracted her. I swapped them." Something thick and hot drips slides down her collarbone, streaks her dress, threatens to drip from her lip, but she can't stop smiling. She swipes at her mouth with her wrist. The fabric comes away red. "I might faint in a minute. That was less fun than I imagined. Will my arm be falling off?"

For an instant it looks as if he might strike her, and the idea is so preposterous that she laughs in his face.

"It can't be so bad as all-- _ oh _ \--" She cranes her neck, looking to her left shoulder, and the mangled flesh comes into nauseating focus. She doesn't want to keep looking but it's mesmerizing, the blood soaking into her sleeve, a white fleck of bone pushing through, skin peeled back like gift wrap. It moves in and out of her vision, like something she's seen in a book, not something on her own body. The edges of her vision waver, like all the light is being sucked from the room. Her breath is coming long and slow and loud in her ears.

"Stop moving," he snarls from somewhere in the dark. The bone disappears as muscle and tendon cover it, and her skin unwrinkles from where it has been peeled like pulling up a shirt.

"It was worth it," Lily says, voice echoing up from the bottom of a well. She turns her head to look at him, and her body moves slow as tar. He lifts his hand to her uninjured shoulder in slow-motion, the bloody kiss still there. His face seems to be very far away, and the set of his mouth is murderous, but there's something more in his eyes, which is the the last thing that seems to be disappearing under the the blanket of darkness that is closing in. "I'm going to faint now, I think."

Severus opens his mouth to speak, panic in his eyes now, and Lily can just barely make out the shape of her name on his lips, but before the sound can make it to her the last of the light winks out and her body tumbles into a whirling darkness.

Time passes, she's sure; she can feel it moving over her body from beneath a smothering blanket of unconsciousness, entirely unlike sleep. She can remember it now, from  _ before. _ From St Mungos, at first, and when the hospital had been infiltrated and the Ministry controlled more closely by Death Eaters, in little hideouts, flats, sometimes even in an alleyway if things went particularly bad. This time, there is only one voice, the healing unfamiliar, almost melodic in Severus' quavering tones, but the poultices smell the same. The pain is the same. The feeling of cursed wounds, of Dark magic writhing on her skin is the same.

When she finally surfaces from the oily darkness, everything hurts. She tries to roll over and there's a rustle, behind her, someone leaning forward, a hand extended--she flinches away until she recognizes it, the long fingers, the scar arcing across the palm.

"Not that side," Severus says sharply. His hand hovers over her arm, as if scared to touch her in this state but will if he must. "You'll open them again."

She wriggles the other way beneath the coverlet to turn toward him. She's still at least partially dressed, in the same she was wearing before; the apron is gone, as is the heavy dress she wore over it for winter, leaving only the light shift behind, some parts still sticky and going stiff with dried blood and rubbed-off ointment. But the bandages beneath hold. Lily pushes herself onto her side, her right shoulder, at least, sturdy beneath her. 

"How long?" Her voice is rough with disuse after screaming.

He sits in a chair across from her bed, legs crossed, hand supporting his head supported in turn by the arm of the conjured armchair, lank and unwashed hair hiding half his face. Exhaustion is warring with anger on his face and, for the moment, exhaustion is winning. "A few hours. Take this." From the table beside him, littered with debris, he lifts one full phial of potion.

From its hue and scent, she knows it to be blood-replentisher. She wrinkles her nose at it as she brings it to her lips. "That bad?"

He watches her down it before answering, fingertip tapping faster than a sparrow's wing at his cheek, a fretful and vulnerable motion in all his stillness. "Your wounds fought my efforts."

She makes a face as the blood-replensisher slides oil-slick down her throat. "The cup?"

He hands her another--this one, pain relief, double strength. "Safe."

She pauses, on her way to her lips. "Volume four?"

His expression flickers; a tiny bit of acknowledgement at her guessing right underneath the roiling boil of frustration. He holds up another potion impatiently, glowing faintly gold--a fortifier of his own design to help encouraged particularly cursed wounds to knit back together. A supply straight from Voldemort's storeroom, from the war front.

Lily knocks back the potion in her hand, and the next, and then a glass of water to wash the taste of fermented scalebark sap and screaming out of her mouth and lets herself collapse backward onto the bed. "All of that was less fun than I imagined espionage to be," she sighs, staring at the ceiling. "Should have known. Didn't remember until just now. I'd much rather a fair fight. How is  _ she _ holding up?"

"Taking her medicine on schedule." Something seems to be kicking about in his mouth, as if he doesn't want to say it but feels he must. Lily is patient; she will talk around him, then.

"I think she meant to take my arms and legs off."

"I'm certain of it. She meant to cauterize the wounds to stave off death. She began to, on your side."

"Lovely. Perfect. How considerate. Thank her for me." She shifts her head, punches the pillow into a shape to better to support it and slides her eyes to his face. "She said she wasn't allowed to touch my heart. Your doing?"

He closes his eyes a fraction of a second too long for a blink. "Yes."

The thing he isn't telling her is still kicking. "There's quite a lot of me that isn't my heart. Could have bled to death. Wouldn't have done my heart good to bleed to death."

"I know." Guilt mutilates his features for a breath. "She was using my curse. I am well aware of its dangers."

She files this away; perhaps it's the truth he's been hiding, but it tastes like continued evasion. "Which curse?"

He's scowling, like he regrets speaking up already. "You know the one.  _ Sectumsempra." _

"Ah." She bites back an admonition about teaching people spells that you don't want used against you, that she believed he had learned that lesson a long time ago. "At least you knew the counter." She goes to stretch, and winces, the new flesh still tender beneath the bandage. "I imagine the kitchen is a mess of gore. How'd you get me past her?"

"Locked her in the room."

"Severus!"

A defiant look moves across his jaw like he is chewing his response rather than spitting it out. Finally, he says, "It was the best option."

"Well, it's not poisoning her," Lily sighs. She flings her right arm over her face. "Though I'm up for a poisoning just now. How careful should I be, and for how long?"

"Your flesh should heal well enough in a day, if you are careful."

"And  _ her?" _ And everyone else, and the world around them, and and and?

"You will not be interacting with her again."

"What are you going to do, leave her locked up?"

His eyebrow says,  _ obviously. _ The set of his mouth says,  _ would you like to fight about it? _

She would. "Because that isn't suspicious at all."

His mouth goes thinner.

"You're going at it wrong. I'm property, not your friend, remember?"

"You'd like to be locked in a cupboard like the good china, then?" he snarls, finally showing his teeth.

She sits up and flings the pillow next to her at him, using the wrong arm of course, and he knocks it out of the air with a sharp crackling wandless magic. She means to say  _ you are being deliberately obtuse _ but fresh pain interrupts her. Her fingers reach through the slice in her shift to find a brittle sort of pain. "Think I tore it," she says through gritted teeth.

He's at her side in an instant, glaring so hard it could shatter glass, but he is gentle. The bandage peeled away reveals the new skin is shredded like an overused tissue. Her hair is a wild mess from sleep and torture and she reaches with her good arm to sweep it out of the way. It brushes across his fingertips as he sets to work. The spell is beautiful, even melodic in his off-key quaver; his touch is gentle, even though he's so clearly furious with the wound. And her.

"You'll have to teach me that wandless shield sometime," she says as he works, making genial conversation with her lap. "I never got the hang of it. I can summon, of course, and a few other things, but a shield seems lovely. For occasions."

He doesn't respond, dabbing on more ointment.

They can't avoid this fight, the one he has been so considerately stepping over since she woke. It makes things simpler, in a way. "Would it make you feel better if I say I learned my lesson? I learned my lesson. This plan was a bad idea. I've been reckless and dragging you along with me. I won't ask something like this of you again."

His voice is cold, his attention focused on applying a layer of bandages that will protect the poultices and new flesh. "And the rest of your little war?"

Her head swivels so fast it makes her dizzy as she peers up at him. "What  _ about _ our war, Severus?"

"It was over before it began. We possess two objects of leverage. The Dark Lord possesses the world." He looks cruel, in this light. Cruel and cold and terrible to behold, every inch the Death Eater Sirius tells her about when he's out of earshot, all things Lily pretends he isn't. But this is the man he is, too. "You must understand, now, that the power of the Dark Lord is not to be trifled with."

She doesn't know when her hands made fists in the sheets. "What I understand is that he needs to be destroyed."

"Then you understand nothing. Defeating the Dark Lord alone will never be enough."

She knocks his hands away, pressing the edges of the fresh bandage down herself. "Do you you want me on my knees pleading for your help, then? What do you want in exchange for our war?" Swinging her legs around, Lily pushes herself to her feet despite the way her body protests, the streaks of dulled pain inking her body anew. She swallows, and the hurt and anger rise up inside her like bile as she grasps Bellatrix's words. "You want me to beg you for it?"

"You've never understood the nature of power. There is no winning this. There will always be a faction that believes you are a thief of power or a mistake, a blight on the face of magic."

" _ You _ don't believe that."

"It does not matter what I believe. It is enough that  _ they _ believe it."

She despises the evasion, despises herself for feeling comforted by his healing and his presence, despises this room in this house. "What do you believe, then?"

He looks as though he's just barely hanging onto his temper. "You take too many risks."

"So you'd have me grow old here with you, then? Never leave this house but to wait on you in public? Die a slave? That's not a life."

"You wish to speak of your life?" His teeth are bared, inches from her. "Every morning you wake up, you should be on bended knee thanking me for that life."

She's shouting now, and so is he. "From a death you brought to my doorstep?"

"From a death your defiance brought to your doorstep!"

"There is no peace between me and this. There never was and there never will be. That is my defiance." She's shaking, and so does her voice, in the low harsh whisper it's become as she reaches for the cruelest weapon she can find. "You may have a house and pet mudblood and the ear of a warlord but I  _ know _ you, Severus Snape, and you're just a scared little boy who read some books and sanded the burr of the mill off his words to fit in with his mates, and you're still doing it. I might be just a bit of skirt you stole, but at least I'm not a coward."

The emptied phial on the table behind him bursts--first one, and then the rest, and then the water glass, tinkling to the floor in a rain of shards. And then the door slams behind him and she can hear the bolt slide home, she knows he's probably cast a handful of the nastiest sort of wards, and that is fine with Lily. That is nothing at all to sit down hard on the edge of the bed over, no reason to put her head in her hands, and if she weeps, it is not tears of anger or frustration or a new understanding of Severus' oldest betrayal. It must be the leftover pain from the attack, nothing more.


	18. Love is a Knife

"You are in quite a lot of danger," Regulus says.

"What a change of affairs," Sirius scoffs.

"More than before," his brother snaps.

Lily rubs gently at the healing slice on her hip. It's to the stage where it itches, and she can't scratch it properly without rupturing the new flesh--she can't even wear trousers, not yet, but it's easier to scratch when she's just in the shift and dressing gown. Regulus had looked fit to faint when she appeared at the table thus, but it scarcely matters. She is trying to pay attention, but Severus has already given his version of events, close enough to the truth that Lily hasn't felt the need to correct him.

He doesn't mention the argument, of course. They had always argued. It is the nature of their relationship. This was worse. It has tapped into his worst, oldest betrayal, and she into his deepest insecurity. She would be a fool to be blind to it, but she can't think of a single way to  _ fix _ it that doesn't leave her helpless and back to servitude. If it were simply her pride or his, or even that awful and delicate thing hanging in the air between them like a chandelier by which all things are illuminated, she would smash it all without a second thought. But this is the war. This isn't about either of them. This is about every woman Macnair has mounted on his wall, the open and weeping eye socket of the nameless servant and the child who should be learning magic instead serving at Lucius Malfoy's house. For all the horrors she doesn't know. She cannot give them up so easily.

Severus hasn't so much as spoken a word to her directly. That morning, he had loosed her for Bellatrix's departure without so much as a glance to she if she would follow him to the entry hall, or if she was dressed, or if she was even alive.

There had been no sense of time in a locked room with no windows. So Lily had thought. All through her time alone, she had paced and thought, and removed memories into the pensieve, and rearranged them, and put them back. There is no recovering the two she has lost, no love poisoned by the agony of loss for James and Harry. There are images and sensation but they are cut away from the whole, cut away from her own feelings for them both, and thus almost meaningless. She had relished their faces at first, waiting for the love to return, but the weight of an infant in her arms is nothing when she can't hold onto the idea that the infant is her own. Perhaps that frustration is fueling her anger now. All the way down the stairs, trailing a sullen Bellatrix, delivering her unto Fenrir with more potions and more instructions to continue their halfhearted sham of treatment. Even when Bellatrix muttered to Severus, "Your girl stands at the edge of a precipice. Do push her off for me," he hadn't said anything, he hasn't done anything, he hasn't so much as come within arm's reach if he can help it. It's as if she's a blazing fire and he's trying not to scorch his robe.

"Three of six," she says, interrupting Regulus' list of ways they could die horribly as a direct result of her actions, which she has heard before and has become less amusing each time he enumerates it. "We have three of six. We need to find the other three."

Regulus says, "There is little more I can do into the House of Gaunt, and as for Ravenclaw's artefacts, the staff is a myth, the quill was supposed to have been in a Muggle museum somewhere but the version there is a fraud and little else exists to suggest where the true quill may have gone, and the diadem is rumored to have disappeared after Helena Ravenclaw's death in Albania. There is very little--"

And the piece falls into place that Lily doesn't realize she has been waiting for. "Albania."

"There is little we can affect in Albania without people on the ground," Regulus says with a dismissive wave of his hand.

"Of course," she says, holding him back from continuing with a hand. "But if we go. In person."

"We could, perhaps, trace the diadem--but it it is unclear if that is the true artefact, if even the Dark Lord did obtain an artefact from Ravenclaw. The House of Gaunt, however--"

"We can go to the House of Gaunt when you find more about it. Albania's the lead we have now, though. Unless you're holding out on us again?"

Regulus pins her with a sharp look and she meets it, an even and impassive surface of ice behind her green eyes. 

Severus' gaze, too, is burning holes in the side of her neck, in her injured shoulder, but she doesn't bother with him.

Sirius is looking at her, intrigued but concerned. "You can't go to Albania, Lily."

"Why not?"

"It'll draw attention," Sirius says, but he sounds unconvinced, like he's following her thought too. "Regulus never goes anywhere without me, and Snape--well, it's known how he keeps you close to the vest. They talk about it." There's no small measure of disgust in his voice, but Lily lets it go. "If anyone were to visit and you weren't here, it'd be suspicious."

"I'm more useful out there," she says evenly.

Regulus splutters helplessly, "This is madness. Infinitely worse than your previous jaunt, no matter how successful. You can't simply disappear from service."

"Of course not. But arrangements could be made."

"Arrangements?" Severus asks, a polished and careful neutral in the repetition.

As far as first words after a long and frigid silence go, it's weak. Weakness she can exploit. She turns a hard look on him. "I'll keep you informed of my progress."

Within an an hour of Sirius and Regulus' departure, she is surrounded by piles of texts in the library. In two, she has returned most of them in favor of the most helpful stack, and transferred her study to the laboratory for the sake of practical experimentation. In three, and four, and five, she has narrowed it down to two spells to start with, alongside a potion or three that Severus certainly has in his stores. None of them are terribly complex alone; combined, they are admittedly a larger undertaking. She will likely need help. No question who that will have to be; he wouldn't let her go to anyone else even if she wanted to. And she doesn't want to. She'd rather his help. The worst of it will be the bit with the blood, but that's all right, there's probably enough in the old shift she shucked off yesterday to be starting with, and if it needs more or fresher there is always blood replentisher and a knife.

When Severus comes to her, melting out of the doorway like a predatory shadow, there is an experiment of dubious success sitting in the cauldron. She has no idea how long it's been at this point, only that she has used up four of the thirty-three doses of polyjuice he has stored in the laboratory, taken two doses of pepper-up and drunk a whole pot of tea, snipped off a lock of hair from the back to pull from when yanking them directly from her scalp became too irritating, shredded her ruined shift into neat squares of brown blood-soaked fabric, squeezed more drops of blood from her fingertip than she cares to count, and this is the only thing she's managed to create that is even close. But she is experimenting, not meaning to achieve the whole of her invention tonight. The first rule of experimenting in magic--a rule Severus taught her, years and years ago, a rule he was taught by his mother, the rule of any wizard who wanted to invent and live to write of his inventions when they failed--is  _ start small. _

He watches for long moments from the doorway, his gaze pinned to the back of her neck, and she doesn't turn.  "Are you making your arrangements?" he asks again, finally, his tone less polished than it was.

Her wand prods into the cauldron, stroking along the length of the thing and observing the response. "Come and see," she says.

He approaches on silent feet, coming to still himself again a hair's breadth from her arm. When he recoils from what she has made as she knows he would, it's a mere shudder, one that brings his sleeve brushing against her arm.

(Goosebumps. Stupid.)

Lifting the thing from the cauldron, her wand flips it and tests the tendons along the back. The hand, a perfect replica of the one holding it, curls its fingers. She flips it back over, putting the palm up toward the ceiling, testing the tendons once more and the bones beneath. From the center of the life line in its arc across the palm, a single bright green eye blinks up at them both, pupil rolling back and forth between their faces.

"A construct of some kind," he guesses, voice flat.

"Got it in one. The catalyst for the form is polyjuice, and the basis for the substrate is blood."

He looks revolted. "The substrate could be anything. Snow, mud, twigs. You chose  _ blood _ ."

"Blood's best for a human form and human reactions, according to this old thing." She thumps a book before her, which growls at her touch. She relishes his horror, however mild. She hates herself, a little, for relishing it. "The parts of it I understood made me think that, anyway. And since it's my blood, it serves to reinforce the form. It's not as if I haven't enough of it. It's not even Dark."

"Some would say any spell that draws on blood is Dark."

She would have said that, and that's why he's saying it, because it serves him to throw her own logic in her face. It's the argument of a schoolgirl convinced of good and evil as identifiable constants, points on a line, pushing herself and everyone she loves far as she can toward one end of the line. His former position will serve her, then. "How's blood different than hair, then? It's just a bit of the body. That logic would make the polyjuice Dark too." She places the hand back in the cauldron where it continues to blink and watch.

"A weak rebuttal. Dumbledore would surely not accept that from a member of the Order."

"He's not alive to disapprove, and Sirius and I are all that's left of the Order that I know about."

He glances at her face, finally, and then back to the disembodied hand the cauldron. He won't say he's impressed, but she knows he is. "It's not a philosophical distinction, you know. Constructs may come out of a cauldron but they aren't potions. If you put a Dark Detector near the finished object, it could go off, if we went too far with the balance of the substrate."

"And, what, everyone would assume you did some kind of Dark bewitchment on me? It would only make your position more secure, if people are talking behind your back about you holding me too close. And she'll bleed properly, too, if anyone needs to see that." She raps the cauldron three times, speaks a counterspell, and drips a bit of a purification tincture onto the thing. The hand squirms and then dissolves into a sludge half-resembling its component parts. "Might help you to let them see her bleed."

He's staring at the sludge in the cauldron, now. "There is a reason why people do not make constructs often, you understand. They are notoriously unreliable."

"There was something in the book about that, but they purpled up the prose so much I couldn't understand what they were trying to say." She leans her hip against the counter, turning to him. "Must be really awful."

Drawing his wand, he says, "You are resolved, then. To follow the dog to Albania in search of an artefact we cannot even confirm is a horcrux." It isn't a question. He flicks his wand to vanish the contents of the cauldron and then meets her eyes.

"Yes." Better a death somewhere in Albania next week than trapped here, in this house, growing old and afraid with the specter of their closeness between them like a hanged man.

He looks away first, sweeping his gaze across her supplies arrayed haphazardly on the bench, absorbing in the complexity of the undertaking. "You will need my help to create a suitable construct."

That, she can admit. "It sounds like a team of apprentices were more what the book is expecting but you'll do."

He surveys her cooly, critically, measuring her determination with his eyes, and then gives one sharp nod.

And so they work, in a strange sort of truce. They haven't worked like this in years, not really, but the muscle memory returns. He won't watch while she bleeds for the tests afresh each attempt, and she won't watch while he does some other horrible, painful thing--he can't help himself sucking breath between his crooked teeth after it's done, and his body moves as if he's been kicked in the ribs for several minutes after--but it speeds up the process considerably.

He doesn't ask permission to do it and she doesn't ask what it is. In the span it took her to create the single success of the offputting hand, they create a hand with no misplaced eye that flexes and responds, an arm attached to a shoulder with a thin protrusion of the collarbone, a head that is like looking in a mirror that blinks and mouths words at them both. The thing won't come together piecemeal, though--it must be made all at once or not at all.

The first attempt together to scale things up, to create a full body, goes remarkably haywire when the entirety of the basis for the substrate catches fire in the cauldron once the blood is added too quickly. A quick lid and a charm to stifle the thing have no effect for long, tense minutes as it consumes the contents and ruins one of three cauldrons in the laboratory large enough to hold a human body. So intent on their task, he doesn't even bother getting angry; together, they Vanish the cauldron and its contents and hoist a new one above the flame.

As they settle it in the clamp above the fire, they both reach to tighten the thing in place, and his hand brushes against hers. For a flash, a half of a moment, he is someone else--not transformed but a different person overlaid over him like a coat of paint, messy hair and glasses and lips pressed to her neck--and Lily feels a surge of love, a heat of yearning so strong it should rattle the cupboard doors.

She snatches her hand back and inspects it, front and back, as if looking for an injury or waiting for an accusing eye to appear in her palm. Severus is watching, looking for an explanation, hands drifting to his sides from edge of the cauldron. "It's nothing," she mutters. "You were someone else, for a moment. That's all."

His mouth twists. He can guess who well enough. It doesn't matter if he hates it. She should reach for the clamp, should secure it above the fire, but she reaches for his hand instead--the one closest to her, the left. Bringing it to her face, she inspects it on both sides, running a fingertip along his palm, the life line, the heart line, the long scar down the center bisecting each. The fingers twitch, like a great pale spider in her grasp, but his face is perfectly still when she looks up into it.

"For better or worse, Sev, I know exactly who you are."

With his free hand, he reaches in past her and tightens the clamp with more force than necessary. The metal squeals as he drives it home. There is a heat in the air that has nothing to do with the fire at their feet.

Suddenly, Lily wants to see it, the first brick in this wall between them. She wants to know its face _. _ She's still holding his arm, so she undoes the buttons at his cuff, and his hand clenches into a fist as she edges his sleeve up, up until she can see the belly of the snake, its fangs, its eyes, etched in stark black across blue veins.

It writhes on him. It moves with his breath, with the blood in his veins. It draws power from him, and he from it, this mark more indelible than any faith or love they could show one another. This is the old betrayal, the one at the root of everything, the one where he spoke what he really thought of her in his heart all those years ago, a belief he held so tightly he let it scratch its poisoned image into his flesh.

The words spill out of her, unbidden. "Did you ever try to leave? After you found what it was really about? That it could hurt real people that you--" 

She cuts herself off, swallowing the word. He won't say it, so neither will she. It will come out like an accusation now, with the flush of heat in her face, with the strange pain of seeing the Mark for the first time lancing through her and something worse, something deeper squirming in her gut. It's the wrong moment.

( _ When, then, is the right moment--? _ )

"I hope for the sake of your soul that you looked for a way out once you knew what it was about. But right now, I don't think you did. I think you liked it. I think you liked the power. I think you liked that it could bring you everything and you didn't care what it took from anyone else."

She looks up to him. There is something terribly complicated between them, and terribly sad.

"You're right," he says, voice sharp and bitter as poison, tearing his arm away. "Is that what you wish to hear? You're right."

She steps closer, feeling brave, feeling foolish, needing to press him and knowing how. "And now?"

He doesn't answer, eyes searching her face.

"What do you believe in now?" As if along a tightrope, she moves closer yet, until she is barely a breath away. "What do you want now?" 

His breathing slows and then stutters to a stop, face still closed but something in his eyes tells her she can take this fight further. 

The arm with the Mark is within her grasp again, and she seizes it, digging her fingernails in through his sleeve, thumbing his still unbuttoned cuff higher to grasp at his bare skin, wanting to hurt. Even as she does, she tilts her face toward him, up and up and up--

There is no wait for his ferocity this time, no moment of delay while she kisses him and he allows it but does not let himself respond. His free arm winds around her, trailing up her spine and drawing her closer even as she seeks to bruise the other, to leave her own mark there as black as the Dark one. His body curves around her own, bending toward her like a flower starved for light. Hand snaking up his chest, up his throat, fingertips skating along his jaw, Lily can almost lose herself in this, in pressing him to her, taking what is hers, in humbling this proud and stubborn mess that calls itself a man. And there is something else, something that she had not anticipated thrumming at the core of her in sympathy with the thing thrumming at the core of him, like a wine glass ready to break at just the right note.

But she doesn't want to cling to him like this, like a drowning thing. She has made her point. With regret, she pulls away, putting her forehead to his shoulder, eyes still closed, the hand curled around the Mark finally relaxing around his forearm. 

He lets out one shuddering breath, hand still tangled in her hair. Says nothing.

"I need you to  _ fight _ ," she growls into his chest, "Not because of me. But because it's the right thing to do."

The boy would have promised her anything, would have told her the moon was in his hands if he needed her to believe it. Would have lied.

The man shakes his head. She can feel him do it with her eyes closed.

"There is too much you don't know," he rasps, breath moving her hair. "Too much that I suspect to be true but cannot confirm. Too many ways--"

"Stop. No more excuses, no more evasion. Helping me along, humoring me, it isn't enough anymore. It means you could pull the rug from under me any time you like. You either think me and everyone of my birth are people with a claim to our own magic just as good as yours or anyone else, or you don't. You have to believe he can be defeated." Opening her eyes and finding his, she drags his arm up again, between their bodies, fingernails pressing tight to the Mark once more. "I need you to be better than  _ this _ ."

Toward her hand, he mutters, "We find the remaining two horcruxes and destroy them." He shifts. It's small, but he is pulling his hand out of her hair, trying to disentangle himself from her without touching her more than he has to, more than he already is. "What then?"

"Three. There are three horcruxes left." She pushes her hand through her hair, drawing it away from her face where it's fallen. "We kill him, Severus. We kill him and he stays dead."

"And then what?" He draws his hand free of her grasp to gesture toward the outside world, to himself. "What of his followers? Those who control the Ministry at his command, the Aurors who rounded up all the muggle-borns, the Muggle ministry, the governments of half of Europe--"

"Azkaban." She's growing impatient, mostly because somewhere deep she suspects his points are valid. "They're collaborators at best and Death Eaters at worst."

"There are too many to jail them all. There are too many people who sat still and quiet at the Death Eaters took over, too many who didn't care to get involved or fled, too many half-bloods who took the deal that was offered them to keep their families safe."

"Read all their minds, then. Legillimency. Take the measure of them individually."

It's a bad solution and they both know it. "There are too many. It would take too long. A counterassault would be mounted, and we lose any open war. We have no army."

"Then what do you suggest?" Lily snaps.

"I don't have any solutions," Severus snarls, finally losing his patience. "The world you are fighting for is gone. My solution is to lock the doors and let the rest of the world go on with burning."

"Then let's douse it in kerosene." She feels wild, furious, and something deep opens inside of her, something leaking sick and vile through the dampening screen of the memory charm. "Set the Dementors loose, end all the old bloodlines, even the innocent ones, even Regulus and Sirius. Demolish Hogwarts to the last stone, burn all the books of spells on a bonfire of every wand we can find. Exterminate the last of the dragons, the phoenixes, the unicorns, anything else that can go at the core of a new wand, and cut the hands off all the wandmakers. No more charms, no more potions, no more Ministry, no more pureblood against mudblood against muggle. No more wizarding world."

"No." The wind has kicked out of him, the horror of this apocalypse writ bright across his face. "No. I can't believe you want that."

"You can't? You can't believe it?" She's wild, laughing with someone else's tears in her eyes. She blinks them back, baring her teeth. "You gave me magic when I was a child. Told me what I was. Then you gave me this world. Let me live to see it." She closes the distance between them, leans close so he can't mistake what she has to say. "I don't want it anymore. Not if this is all it is. Not if this is all it can be."

He swallows twice, takes a breath and curses with it, one vile word spoken in the air like a spell. He puts his hand to his face and draws it down, and once it passes over his eyes, he looks at her as if he is meeting her anew for the first time. 

"I believe you." Because he hasn't before, of course. He had heard her, but never understood her until now. "I believe in you. And I would help you do it, if it comes to that. I'd do anything."

And then he says it, voice cracking, those dreaded three words that have been on his lips all these years. Invokes the name of the monster and brings it into its full and horrible reality. 

"I love you."

And there it was. The price of belief. His love, this knife. It's not some useless lust she can take and use and throw away or hope he'll grow out of, worse than some overgrown boyhood infatuation. And she knew. And she kissed him anyway, to get what she wanted. She wants to shred the words from the air, to erase them, to blot them out, but the stain is indelible as blame. It's precisely the wrong thing, exactly what she hadn't wanted, inside her like a thorn beneath skin.

Her voice is rougher than it has to be. "That isn't a better solution." 

But it is, for him. That's precisely why he's said it. She turns from him, away from the terrible vulnerability on his face, away from his revolting desire to be subsumed under her vision for a future the same way he had been willing to be subsumed by the Dark Lord's, away from his clear and awful need to hear her say something equal in return, the weight of the dead she can't remember enough of and the silence in her own heart like a hand over her mouth preventing anything more. She turns to prod the fire beneath the cauldron high once more. "Come on, then. We have to try again." The silver dagger is in her hand again, and she barely feels the edge moving across her palm, parting the skin so she can bleed again.


	19. Constructed

Lily wakes up cold and wet, lungs sucking for air. Something cold and slimy is all around her and she reaches blindly, finding the edges of something she's been stuffed into, pulls herself up on wobbling knees and gasps for air, clinging to the edge she's found.

Her head slowly clears as the air fills her lungs her lungs. She's naked, she realizes, no idea where she is, no idea what has happened, memory a jumbled mess with no sense to it, but what happened? Memories of kissing James are at war with memories of kissing Severus are at war with memories of the war, her war. Has she been captured? Have they won?

She scrubs at her eyes, but it does nothing. There are muffled voices, and then a towel is on her face, roughly wiping away the slime coating all of her skin. She seizes it from the hands who have pressed it to her skin and scrubs it across her face messily. The slime catches again in her throat and she retches, legs failing beneath her like a foal's.

A warm hand scoops beneath her elbow, pulling her up. The hand isn't gentle but it is warm and the shapes before her are indistinct, fuzzy in the dark before her open eyes. The hand puts one elbow on the side of the thing she's climbing out of, and then finds the other and places it there, lending stability.

When breath finds her, she uses it to curse, at length, colorfully. One of the shadows in front of her laughs; the other makes a disapproving sound.

Lily turns the towel in her hand to find a clean face of it to wipe again at her eyes and clear her ears. The towel comes away bright with blood. She must be injured, but there is no pain, or not yet. The outlines in front of her become more distinct.

"Where am I?"

The one who laughed, now serious, says, "In your home."

"This isn't my home," she whispers. It's nothing she can put her finger on; something in the air is wrong. The draft isn't the draft creeping through the windows she knows, not even in winter--is it winter? It's so cold, her heart is racing and a violent shiver overtakes her.

"It is now," the voice says. It sounds familiar, like someone she knew once, but twisted, wrong. Almost like Petunia, but that's madness. Petunia isn't in the war. Petunia wouldn't be so deadly calm in the face of her blood-covered sister climbing out of--whatever this thing is, that she's been stuffed in. Lily scrubs at her face again and pulls herself upright, closer to them.

The womanshaped shadow on the left resolves itself into a pale streak framed in red--not Petunia--no, a mirror. That's all she can be, though the woman before her is not covered in gore and slime. Her hair is parted on the wrong side and her arms are crossed. The left hand has no ring and Lily feels, immediately, for the ring on her own finger. They've taken her wedding ring. The woman before her looks dispassionate, colder, more distant than she has ever looked to herself in a mirror. If Lily has been an arrow in the war, the woman before her has been an axe.

"Where are Harry and James?" she hisses to the vile reflection. "Don't tell me they're dead, I know they can't really--"

The mirror-woman looks to her left, to the dark figure standing there, and Lily follows her gaze and starts once recognition settles in.

"You!"

Severus Snape, the Death Eater--the traitor--her old friend--the monster who took her from them, who let them die--

His presence seals it. They really are gone. James and Harry both. Lily lunges forward with a raw scream, bare feet slipping on the bottom of the cauldron, seizing the front of his robes. He's too startled to dodge. His face is close, pale, horrified, dark eyes gone wide with surprise. 

"How dare you show your face to me after what you've done? How dare you? How--"

A tearing sound--the shoulder of his robe rips, and she slips back again, elbow singing loud with agony as it slams into the cauldron. Her legs still shake but she muscles her way out of the thing, staggering toward him like a wraith from a lake as he backs away. The viscous slime and gore drips from her limbs as she approaches him on unsteady legs, and  _ he _ runs out of room to back away once his shoulders meet the wall. His wand is in his hand but he clearly has no idea what to  _ do _ with it.

Behind her, the mirror-woman lets out a bark of laughter with no mirth in it, and flicks a curse to freeze her just as she has wound her fingers into his robe again, fingers scrabbling for his throat. He tries to tug away, to slide himself out from her grip, but can't. There's no moving but she can bore hate into his face with her eyes, so she does.

"Well," the woman says, moving closer on bare feet. "That's interesting. Am I right in thinking we did it  _ too _ well?"

Severus' eyes shear from hers to move to the other woman's. "Possibly. No enchantments or charms would be carried over."

"And it has all of it." The woman comes into view, sidling up to Severus to scrutinize Lily's face. "All the memories I'm missing, under that charm of yours, this thing has. And it does  _ that. _ " 

From behind her locked jaw and teeth, a guttural sound comes, another string of curses muted by the body-bind.

The mirror-woman's gaze cuts sideways to pin Severus as effectively as Lily's own grip. "What do you think?"

"I think you should remove her from my robes."

"Don't be dense. Do we try to charm it to block the memories same as they are on me, or start over with something else?" 

They both ignore the furious sounds she makes again.

Severus turns his gaze back to her, eyes flat and calculating now that the surprise has worn off. After a moment, he says, "It will be easier to change before this stage in the process. The substrate, perhaps."

Lily can't follow this conversation and doesn't care to, but she can take in the gist. The mirror-woman lifts the body-bind and Lily sags against Severus before propelling herself away from him in hate--straight into the mirror-woman's grip. She's caught by the wrist, a wrist that the mirror-woman pulls sharply up, and then dragged by her arm twisted behind her, screaming, squirming, kicking out, but inexorably back to the cauldron.

"In you get," the mirror-woman says, in a singsong voice she might reserve for a child.

Lily kicks, shrieking for help, for James, for Dumbledore, for anyone, but the other woman is strong and has a wand to send her feet shooting out from underneath her. Lily overbalances, crashing back into the cauldron once more.

The mirror woman speaks a spell she doesn't recognize, and drips something clear onto her legs even as they kick and pinwheel in the air, and then everything goes soft and dark and liquid, her skin is sloughing off her bones without pain, but there are no bones inside of her, only blood, a cascade of blood filling up the cauldron, flowing from somewhere--it seemed inside of her-- and her vision goes dark--

Leaving only the other Lily, standing over the cauldron into the slow dissolving soup of their latest attempt at a construct.

Once they are well and completely alone again--once even the accusing eyes have melted back to nothingness--Lily turns to him.

"That was horrible," she says. "Let's do it again."


	20. The Doe I

It was a night of feverish work, Lily reflects sleepily. With the assistance of Severus's speeding enchantment that left him limping and in pain, that first night they tried five times, in total, to create a construct. Each was a different failure: the first cauldron-ruining attempt; another that stubbornly remained sludge no matter what they threw at it; one that successfully catalyzed into a sickening shade that precisely matched her skin and sprouted disgusting red hair on one side but never achieved form; and one which exploded in steam that screamed in her own voice and scalded both of their palms when they tried to clap a lid on the thing. She found the burn salve first, and the jar took of strips of skin when she opened it. She smoothed it on his hands before her own anyway, and they bickered amiably enough about temperature in the catalyst while he spun new skin out of thin air for her palm. And after that, they had produced the dubious success: the thing that had tried to throttle Severus.

She still wasn't sure if that could be called a  _ success _ if it raised more dangerous questions than it could possibly answer.

Integrating additional spells to the thing compounded the difficulty exponentially and had brought active experimentation to a halt. A memory charm could work, but would require a formed mind with memories to truly take hold, making the timing of the addition awkward at best; other options were volleyed over a breakfast of stale bread and cheese summoned along with tea from the kitchen. And then it was ten in the morning and neither of them had slept decently in a week, or at all in the past 24 hours, but neither wanted to stop, either. There were breadcrumbs all over the open books that Severus wanted to clear up. Lily went gone back across the hall to the library to find one of her previously-discarded tomes to prove him wrong with, gotten caught up in the text with the words swimming in front of her face--the point she had been trying to make about the potential for calming draught integrated into the substrate was rather more complicated than she had remembered--and then Lily wakes up in the armchair with the last of the afternoon sunlight trickling in through the window beneath the red flame of a setting spring sun.

The book she fell asleep on is gone. The inside of her mouth feels like wallpaper paste. Lily conjures a glass and water and downs it in one go. There is also a blanket tucked around her shoulders and spread across her legs, soft and warm and dark green, one she recognizes but has never slept beneath before. The blanket smells of a body the way a bed does, of skin and of the person: in his case, of turpentine, sour sweat, sulphur, the sharp and animal musk of unwashed hair.

She can put it together easy enough, can imagine the physical mechanics of it: him finding her asleep on the chair, going to his bedroom, taking the blanket off his own bed to drape across her, pulling the book from beneath her fingertips and continuing on in their work alone. 

It's all very  _ loving, _ this little gesture done under the cover of her own sleep, and it all makes her a bit ill to think of it in that light. All the tiny, considerate motions in the world will not save anyone, cannot bring anyone back to life. She hates this vision of him, romantic, doting, kind as a husband. It's repulsive.

But it's not the whole of him. There's quite a lot of him she likes. It's what she'd gone to sleep worrying at, underneath the research; she couldn't put her finger on what it was, that thorn under her skin, on what exactly it was that had moved so powerfully when she had kissed him.

Sleep has made it clear. Her thoughts are orderly in the last night of the day. She  _ should _ hate him as much as the construct did--she does, somewhere inside of herself, and she will likely hate him like that again--but that doesn't cancel anything else out. She does care for him; she even likes him, in pieces.

She summons tea, sugar, more bread to chew on. If Severus is in the halls he will follow it, but she is willing to bet he is still shut up in the lab.

And isn't that the crux of it. The Severus she likes is the one she was working with; the one with a mad kind of light in his eyes, the one she had been humming alongside, aside from that near-hallucination of him confessing his  _ undying love-- _ its own demand in response to hers. And she likes that, too, that he won't let himself be swindled or cheated, not even by her; it makes her manipulations of him feel less cruel. Lily likes his efficiency even when it borders on brutality, likes his intelligence and how he trusts hers to match it, and--she is willing to admit it to herself, at least--likes the roaring fire of his care for her, if not for her vision. Even when it threatens her goals, even as she rails against it, it warms her all the same.

And she must acknowledge the cold fact that even a kicked dog will worship the master who deigns to feed it; Severus is the only person she's had the pleasure of company in three years who has treated her as a human being and not a sack of meat, not a house-elf, not an idiot, not a tool, and in the case or Sirius, not as a ghost. Severus sees her for what she is, whatever she is, whatever he's made of her. What she's made of herself, in the wreckage. They are two plants grown from the same earth and shut in a closet; they have grown intertwined and strange together.

So, a blanket. A new touch of kindness, of humanity. Very well. For a fleeting second, she wonders if this is how the mystery of the man with the dark messy hair and glasses who leaps to the surface of her memories like a bright and elusive fish had loved her. If  _ he _ would drape a blanket over her sleeping body. If she were capable, once, of accepting that sort of kindness when another man's hands were tucking it around her shoulders.

She folds the blanket into a soft square and drapes it over the back of the chair she'd fallen asleep in and freezes that thought over as soon as it begins to make smoke. Lily indulges in a long stretch, and then a handful of freshening charms, which are not a shower but will have to do. She's wasted enough time pondering the cosmic significance of a blanket as it is. The last of the sun is has dripped from the high windows above the bookshelves and a dark blue has infected it from above and is now pressing the last of the light from the air. She pads silently across the hall, her mind quiet, everything frozen beneath Occlumency as far as it will go. The door swings open silently at her touch.

There is a dead doe hanging in the laboratory.

Her wand is in her hand before she can even completely register the poor thing, hanging by her feet, trussed to a pole that spins slowly in midair. Her throat has been slit but she still moves, still takes labored but slow, regular breath; something is keeping her alive to suffer.

\--Magic, of course. Magic is keeping her alive. Suddenly the idea of purging it from the earth doesn't seem so terrible.

"What are you doing?" She already suspects the answer, but if he hasn't heard her enter it's better to give him a bland question than to sneak around and risk spoiling the work.

He's hunched over a cauldron. Hasn't lit the lamps yet, so he's working near-darkness, shoulders moving beneath his robes as he stirs. "A moment." An arm snakes out, lifts one of the squares cut from her bloody shift, and it disappears into the cauldron.

Closing the door behind her, she twirls her wand nervously in two fingers, then prods the air and rolls her wand slowly in her fingertips, lighting the lamps and bringing their illumination up slowly so as not to shock his eyes.

A few long moments of silence, then: "Come."

"Is it stable?" She moves closer.

"Yes, but I have to finish incorporating the powdered starthistle."

"Ah. Close, then." His head is still bent over the cauldron as one hand stirs and the other shakes in the powdered bone bit by bit from a spoon. When he swings his head up to look at her, she blanches. "Good lord. You look worse than usual."

He scowls at her, which does nothing to improve his looks, and ducks back down to the work at hand. His eyes are red, face drawn and grimy, hair flat and clumped messily together with grease. There's a streak of dried blood only half rubbed away marking his cheekbone, and a spray of something sickly green speckles his face and throat, as if he crushed something vile--probably the fermented gloriana root--with too much force. And the smell--it's better not even to think of the smell of the unwashed body of a potioneer who has worked more than 24 hours straight over a hot flame with such unsavory ingredients.

He'd be hideous to even the most charitable descriptions, and as if bidden by taking him in fully, there's that surge of bizarre corresponding affection again, the one she has no idea where to put or what to do with. Because, of course, it's all the evidence of stubborn, furious hard work. And it's not as if she's much better, really--under the lingering ozone of freshening charms, it's clear she's been hard at work as well.

"The doe's blood as the basis for the substrate," she says, glancing into the cauldron. The contents is darker than it has been with her own blood. "For my patronus?"   
  


He nods, still focused. "You were correct about blood being best, I think, but we need the product to be more biddable. You have a connection to the animal."

"Where the hell did you even  _ find _ a deer in  _ Cokeworth, _ Severus?"

"I didn't. I had to go further." He shrugs, still stirring, stretching his neck to one side and then the other. One lock of greasy hair frees itself from the rest and dangles in front of his face, swaying with his movement.

Lily decides she doesn't want to know how far, and that it doesn't matter. If there's one, there's more. "What if it comes out with deer ears? Or a tail?" She mimes the ears on her own head, a pale parody of the half-dead thing behind her.

He fixes her with a withering glance before returning to the starthistle.

She tries another tack. "You have to keep it alive?"

"You would rather I kill it?" He shakes his head once, sharply. "It has to stay alive if the construct is to retain its integrity. It becomes the resonant object instead of you."

"Are you going to keep it here?"

His motion jerks to a stop for a second, then resumes.

"You hadn't thought of what to do with the animal, did you? If you take it back to the woods and it gets hit by a lorry you'll have to explain muggleborn soup on your floor to all your worst friends."

He taps in the last of the starthistle and gives the substrate one last, sharp turn around the cauldron. "That is irrelevant if this is a failure." He doesn't seem to want to turn his attention to her.

"It won't be if this is a success, and I think it might be. I think it's brilliant." She puts a hand on his arm, even though his sleeve is sticky with something revoltingly half-dried. "You need to rest. I did, and I feel loads better. The substrate's stable now, it'll keep."

He draws his spine straight, though it clearly pains him. He's been hunched over the cauldron so long--she knows the feeling. "I'm fine."

"You're just being contrary. Don't make me hex you to sleep, I don't want to drag you, it won't do anything for that kink in your neck."

Severus bridles. "Don't mother me."

Lily snatches back her hand from his shoulder even as she bites back her instinctive response-- _ I won't be mothering anyone, will I? _ \--and pinches the bridge of her nose. She counts to ten, and reaches for a less barbed lead to put him on. "You are a mule. You look like hell and I can't imagine you feel better. Your hair alone--tired wizards make mistakes, and if you pass out and drown in substrate then we're all done for."

When he doesn't respond, she stretches her wand-arm past him and sets a sealing charm over the cauldron to protect the contents from contamination, then flicks the wand below the cauldron to extinguish the fire there. Her other hand reaches for his hand and tugs on it. He digs in his heels for a moment, and she changes her grip from his fingertips to his wrist, tugs again. "For the love of--come  _ on. _ "

Something stubborn comes up in the set of his jaw, staring at her fingers wrapped around his wrist, but it crumbles before her eyes, and he follows, finally.

On the threshold of his bedroom, he halts again, as if he doesn't want her to enter, but she draws him past the threshold all the same, to his bed, and with a little shove he sits heavily on the edge. When she drops his wrist, he leans forward, putting his elbows onto his knees, his head in his hands.

"When was your last stimulant? Pepper-Up, Dredge Drink, anything with dragon claw?"

He looks over his fingers toward the window above the bed, but the darkened sky outside reveals little. His neck droops again and he shakes his head. "I don't know."

"Before or after I fell asleep?"

He rubs his forehead with a thumb, absently picking at the dried speckles of splattered ingredient. "After."

"Hm." She crouches before him, takes his chin between her thumb and forefinger, makes him look at her. "Your pupils are still dilated, too. Dreamless Sleep wouldn't be safe, then, at least not for a while."

He wrenches his chin from her grip and glares up at him from beneath his brow. He wouldn't take it even if it were, clearly.

"Guess I'll have to sit with you, then.  _ Accio." _ A bright and singing thought is blossoming in her, and she can satisfy both goals at once. It takes a moment for the book to come zooming in from the library, and she snatches it out of the air fast enough that, she hopes, Severus can't see the title. The bed is easily broad enough for two, and Lily stuffs a few pillows against the headboard to make a comfortable enough seat to prop herself up against, tucking her knees up to her face and propping the book against it as she cracks it open.

"Are you  _ really. _ "

She looks over the edge of the book at him, face marshaled into seriousness and voice accusatory. "You threw a blanket on me and kept going. I will smother you with kindness or I will smother you the other way."

They glare at each other for a moment, him over his shoulder, her over her book. The stretch of warring silence broken only by him scratching absently at the patchy stubble on his jaw, picking at the caked-on grime. Lily is still skimming the index and tapping entries with her wand to make their pages glow when she feels his weight lift off the bed. In her periphery she sees him move to the closet and draw forth something, and then move to bathroom. The door clicks shut, and water begins to run.

She's just eliminated her fifth choice form the index when he emerges, damp and still drawn but wearing a fresh nightshirt under a dressing gown, and neither looking nor smelling like the sweepings from the laboratory floor. His weight sinks heavily into the bed and the covers beneath her tug.

Lily glances over. He's settled on his back, one hand over his face. She lifts the hand by the thumb and he blinks at her, then goes to staring at the ceiling. His pupils are going back to normal. Drawing her wand from above her ear and closing the book, she says lightly, "Better?"

His face tightens up, twisting like a spring. "No. I'd rather be working."

Flicking her wand cuts the light from the room, leaving them both in the faint light of the waxing gibbous moon washing in from the window to the wall opposite. "Your patronus has got to be a mule."

He snaps back so quickly, so bitterly, that it exposes much more than he means it to, and it's got to be the truth. "It isn't."

_ Oh. _ Well, that rather takes the guessing out of it.

Lily presses the back of her head to the headboard, staring at the same spot in the ceiling he's staring at, and finds his hand with her own. It's not pity that she's feeling, but there's a fist around her heart, as if it was  _ her _ confession and not his. She thinks of the doe in the laboratory, kept alive. Their fingers twine together almost by accident, almost as if by not looking at it they don't have to acknowledge it. His fingers are warm from the water, for once, and curve around her own.

It takes a while for his breathing to even out, for his hand to loosen around her own in sleep. She waits longer to ensure he is well and truly under, and plans exactly how she'll extract her hand, finger by finger, so as not to disturb him. She may have slept a few hours in an arm chair but even this spell of wakefulness has her feeling all the aches and exhaustion of the week. All she wants is her own bath and, finally, to spend a full night of sleep in her own bed without anyone to wake her. 

When she closes her eyes, she does, truly, intend to only rest them for a moment.


	21. The Doe II

Waking up in Severus' bed is not what Lily had planned for the day.

She's managed to curl onto her side, half-laying atop the few pillows she had reclined against. Severus is a snoring knot of limbs and hair in the corner of the bed. He's rolled toward her in the night, and the blanket is rucked up around his shoulders. She isn't touching him and he isn't touching her except at their fingertips. She could blame the work they've done the past day for all of it easily enough it it weren't for that. Even so, she wants to steal this moment for herself, his face unlined and almost soft in sleep.

_ Well, now who's repulsive, _ Lily thinks, running a fingertip along his knuckles _. _

And then the anti-intruder jinx shoots its head off. 

Waking up in Severus' bed with an intruder jinx shrieking at her was  _ definitely _ not what she had planned for the day.

She sits bolt upright, tearing her hand from his. Severus flails for a moment and then comes up on his elbows, cursing. They don't have to look at each other in fear; it's already dancing in the air before them as they both scrabble to their feet, for their wands--Lily snatches up the book from where it fell, open, onto the floor while she slept. A few pages are crinkled from the floor and he'd want her to straighten them, but there isn't time, she snaps the book shut by the spine and seals the creases in for good. There is a whole host of new feelings going on inside of her--shame, guilt, terror, a pernicious warmth, curse it--all of which are completely inconvenient and useless and she shoves them away with the same decisive motion that rakes her hair out of her face. 

She makes it to the door first only because she is unencumbered with blankets. She presses her ear to it but the blaring alarm--like a cat in heat--drowns out everything else. "Shut the thing off!" she throws over her shoulder in a furious whisper.

There's a fumbling of blankets and wand and the sound of the alarm gets sucked up a tube, increasing in pitch, and then dies.

Beneath, silence. Then, a voice calling her name. A voice she knows. Her stomach almost turns itself inside-out.

It would be fine if it were Death Eaters, but  _ him-- _

Lily throws open the door. She needs to get out of this room. Right now.

"Wait," Severus hisses behind her, fumbling his way onto his feet, "Who--"

There's no time. She banishes the book back to the library with a slam, and the instant it leaves her hand she is in a dead sprint, down the hall, round the corner, taking the stairs two at a time.

At the bottom of the staircase in the entry hall, the intruder is waiting, shaking soot from his hair with a smile. "Sorry to barge in. We didn't hear from you. Thought Bella might have come back and finished the job. Regulus didn't feel the need but I did, so I came."

"Sirius," Lily pants, trying to sound delighted. It doesn't come off in the least. "How nice to see you. Feels like you were here yesterday."

"It was the day before yesterday," he says, eyeing her rumpled clothes and bleary eyes. "Did I wake you? We sent ahead in the vanishing box. More than once. Wanted to figure out transport to Albania, and we've had some news and some rumors you might need to hear in person."

"We've been busy." She scrubs her hand over her face, trying to be awake enough for this conversation to not go completely haywire.

"Busy?"

"My arrangements. For our trip." She's catching her breath back, finally, and managed half a smile. "It's coming along. Should have something to show today, actually."

"Already?" 

He looks surprised, and it annoys her. "Yes,  _ already. _ You expected us to wait til Easter?"

He holds up both hands. "Thought it was complicated."

"It  _ is. _ "

He looks incredulous. "And you managed to solve it in a day and a half?"

"Not yet, but we're close. It's not as if it's never been done before, constructs are dead useful, they're just tricky and not always as obedient as a house-elf so it's a bit arcane, most of the literature is from before the last of the goblin wars. The substrate is simple enough for a child, it's just--"

Sirius holds up his hands. "I don't need to know all the details."

She crosses her arms. "Then why did you ask?"

He's exasperated with her now. "Merlin, Lily, I don't know what that git lets you get into."

Behind her, another voice, cold and familiar all in one breath: "I  _ let _ her do very little. What she does is entirely of her own accord."

Over her shoulder, she watches Severus descends the stair, sweeping in like a vampire in his day robes and looking just as poised and composed as she isn't. The way Sirius' face twists up says he could hex him just for breathing. She lets out one sharp breath that could almost be a laugh, if she let it. Appearances. She's sure she looks like a vagrant and smells worse. 

When Severus reaches her side, he turns to her and asks, "Why is the dog here alone?"

"I'm here as a  _ courtesy _ ," Sirius objects. "Not that  _ you _ would appreciate--"

Lily ignores him. "Apparently we missed some notes in the box while we were working. Arrangements for Albania. And other things."

"Ah." He fixes Sirius with a narrowed gaze. "We were occupied."

Lily rolls her eyes. "Do you have to make it sound so sinister?" Sinister's better than the alternative, but still.

"I recall that you bled into the cauldron no less than five times for the substrate."

"Severus!" Lily admonishes, at the same time as Sirius draws himself up and says, "Blood?"

Severus has a bit of an unkind smile around the edges of his mouth. It isn't the kind of smile a nice man would have so ready to display, with a curl of the lip and a threat of teeth. He's using it against her, she knows, the mission, her willingness to compromise her previously-inflexible opinion on borderline Dark magic in the name of the hunt for darker.

"Yes, Sirius, blood," she sighs, putting a hand to her forehead. "My blood to make a duplicate of myself. And before you ask, it was my idea."

Sirius looks as though she's just sprouted a unicorn horn in the middle of her forehead. He looks to Severus, who, despite his initial effect of poise, had not raked a comb through his hair--though it lays relatively flat but does he even  _ own _ a comb--and then to her hair, which is a tornado rendered in red. A question has clearly just occurred to him, and it pinches his brow. Lily resists the urge to card her fingers through her hair in an attempt to neaten it.

"Well," Sirius says slowly. "We just got worried. You lot typically keep an eye on the Vanishing box. But it seems you both are--are all right."

Hell. The only thing worse than open inquiry is closed suspicion. Lily thinks longingly of a bath that she won't get. "The new substrate needs to get on the heat now if we want to test it out today. You want to hang around while we brew?"

Severus looks down his nose at both of them. "In a kennel, perhaps?"

"As opposed to the belfry you spend your nights in, Snape?"

And that's rather too close to it for Lily's taste. "Do you want to fight about nothing, or do you want to get things done?" She turns to the stair, and then beckons to Sirius over her shoulder. Severus will come or not of his own accord. "Come up and tell me the news you sent. There's a half-dead deer in the lab. Try not to be horrified."

Thus prepared, Sirius only makes a sad little noise in the back of his throat when he follows her into the lab and sees the deer. "It's still alive?" Sirius asks.

"Has to be. Like Polyjuice, if you remember that from Potions. Uses the resonant magic in a part of the body to call back to the original. It's how you replicate scars and whatnot. If the resonant object dies, the connection is broken." Lily sets a fire beneath the large cauldron in the center of the room, and then lifts the sealing charm above the substrate in it. It's cold, and a thin sheen of shimmering oil has coalesced at the top, but there's no congealed film to remove, no sign of contamination or antiquing indicating the magic's gone strange overnight. The color has deepened to a red that is almost black. 

"You won't want to get too close, Black," Severus says haughtily as he enters, moving to her side. "This work is not without dangers." He peers at it, delicately hovering the tip of his wand over the surface. It trembles as if touched and then reacts, a point pulling out of the liquid towards the tip of his wand. To Lily, he murmurs, "It still appears to be viable."

"Of course it is, I know how to set a sealing charm," Lily mutters irritably. "So what's the news, Sirius?"

"Right. Well--Snape's poison didn't work at Beauxbatons, but the castle still fell."

Lily stills for a second. Her doing, of course. Her first demand. She looks over her shoulder, and Sirius is leaning against the wall but he doesn't seem at ease as the pose suggests. "What do they suspect?"

"Incompetence. Tampering." Sirius' gray eyes are fixed on her own, narrowed. His shoulders tighten up further. "There's a whisper or two about you, Lily. Not many, but any at all is too much."

Lily turns back away, dropping the olivewood paddle into the cauldron and beginning a slow, deliberate stirring as the cauldron warms. "Has--  _ he _ said anything?" She can't bring herself to call him  _ the Dark Lord. _

"Not yet, but it's coming from enough angles he's heard it more than once. People who were at the front are out for blood, since they were relying on the poison to do the hard work. Suffered more losses taking the castle than they planned, but they took it anyway, eventually." Sirius leans away from the wall, arms crossed, taking a few steps toward them both. "Sent the whole river up in steam, and since it was poisoned, anyone who breathed it--well. It took a while longer but it got the job done. It was nasty stuff. But they seemed to know even where the steam was, not that it saved them in the end. What did you do to it, anyway?"

"Charmed the nightshade." She looks at Severus across the cauldron, trying not to dwell on the horror of those deaths, the deaths she wrought. "We're ready to flee when we have to."

Severus doesn't meet her gaze. "I will manage the Dark Lord's suspicion before that becomes necessary," Severus says, voice flat, eyes fixed on her hands as they stir, watching for the coiling steam.

"You'll  _ manage _ him?" Sirius said, voice dropping an octave, ending with a humorless laugh. "He reads minds, Snape, I thought you knew that."

"I know a great many things you do not, Black," Severus snarls, eyes flickering towards the man. "We do not all resort to living as beasts for protection."   
  


"You know what he's going to do to you?" Sirius jeers, moving closer. "You have any idea what he does to people who have failed him? Have you ever failed him this  _ badly _ before?"

Lily can see Severus' jaw working, and she interjects, movements still smooth through the potion. "What, exactly, will he do?"

"Torture," Sirius says simply, looking a far sight too pleased about the thought.

Lily looks sharply at Severus. "Will you be able to keep control? Keep him out of what we can't have him knowing?"

"I have before," he snaps. He waves a few long fingers through the circling mist; it's almost ready, and he reaches for the phial of polyjuice, adding a single long red hair to it with precise movements. "At least I am willing to take risks rather than sit trembling among my books."

The barb lands. "Regulus is braver than you'll ever be," Sirius snarls.

"Sirius--"

The tension is giving her a headache. When they've met in the past, they had been able to at least ignore each other for her own and Regulus' sake. She had hoped the work of the construct, of delivering the news could occupy them, but--

"As if you would know anything about it, spending most of your time as a housepet," Severus drawls.

" _ Severus--" _

Sirius is on his feet, now, coming forward, toward them. "You had to be dragged kicking and screaming by  _ her _ into this! We were rescuing muggleborns and stealing horcruxes while you were opening the gates and murdering seventeen-year-olds during the Siege of Hogwarts!"

Severus draws himself up, and his wand is out of his sleeve, and this has all gone quite far enough.

Lily's wand is up, out in her free hand, the incantation lands like a profanity and a the shield charm goes up between them. "Enough!" Lily roars. "That is enough out of you.  _ Both _ of you. I  _ won't-- _ you  _ will not.  _ We are on the  _ same side! _ "

On opposite sides of her, they keep their glares up, hackles raised, wands drawn, both looking like dogs ready to fight. She glares at Severus, but he stays put, and she thrusts the stirring paddle towards his free hand. Negotiating her way around the shield charm, wand still keeping it firmly up, Lily moves to Sirius. She seizes him by the arm with an unforgiving grip and drags him to the door of the laboratory, past the deer in her silent pain, into the hall. 

He looks furious, and he curses at length and colorfully. Severus' mother's honor is well and thoroughly stained by the end of it. 

Lily lifts the shield once she's sure Severus isn't following--his rage cannot be trusted, no amount of holdover tenderness could make her that much of a fool--and takes two long, deep breaths. The silencing spell goes up easier than the shield does, and her wand goes back into her sleeve. When she speaks, she's level, not shouting. "We can't go on like this."

"I don't know how you stand him," he mutters.

"I don't know how you hate him so much," she says, exasperated. "This schoolboy nonsense should have burned out by now."

"Schoolboy--!" Sirius looks angry, shocked. "You've no idea how much he's done, what he'd still be doing if you didn't-- _ " _

"I don't?  _ I _ don't?" She prods Sirius in his chest with force to interrupt him. "Are you with me or not? Are you fighting against the one who murdered Harry and James or are you fighting this other provincial little war of yours?"

"And what if he played more of a part in their deaths than you know about?" Sirius demands in a furious whisper, edging close to her so she can hear him clearly. "What if fighting the war is fighting him too?"

"I trust him." And it's true, when it comes out like that.

"Because you have to."

She sighs. "Maybe. But also because I want to. Because it's better than the alternative."

Defiance, cold and calculating, close up his face completely. "And what if you're wrong?"

She thinks, for a split second, of her hand in Severus'. Of what he said. Of love, and how little it solves.

Freeze it. Freeze it all. She cast the silencing spell for a reason.

"If I'm wrong, then I need you more." She glares, hating every word, but true trust is a luxury for those who can afford it, those not holding the balance of a tenuous alliance together with sheer force of personality and will. "I need you to pretend to trust him enough to keep the peace and notice when he slips. I need you to tell me the things you think I'm blind to, like a spy would. If you really think he's pulled one over on me, if you really think he's out to betray us, you need you to bring me proof, Sirius. If that's what you really believe, then that's your duty. Until then, it's a schoolboy spat that is getting in my way."

Sirius glances back to the door, tongue flicking along a canine tooth, predatory toward the prey she's set him toward. In this moment, she hates both of them almost as much as herself.

"I need to talk to him, too," Lily sighs, letting it go as best she can, . "Alone. Can you give me that?" She rubs her forehead, trying to seek and remove the headache forming there. "You did wake me up, and I haven't had any tea. If you wouldn't mind making a pot, that would give me a minute. It's all I need."

His eyes bore into hers for a split second, mistrust evident, but then he nods once, sharply. "All right," he says, like his mouth is dry. "All right. I could use some too."

Lily grips his shoulder with one hand and dispels the silencing charm with the other, not wanting to thank him so much as reassure him, and then marches back into the laboratory without a backwards glance or a second thought.

Severus is still at the cauldron, still stirring, still scowling. This is the part that requires two sets of hands, and he cannot proceed without her, which means he also can't escape her.

Sirius' footsteps die away, down the stairs, from the door. Good. That's enough to work with.

"You need to stop provoking him," Lily mutters without preamble, retrieving the stirrer from his hands and resuming the movement without interruption. 

"I see no reason for it." His wand strikes a phial and it glows for an instant as it's warmed. He holds it up to the light.

"You make him suspicious on a good day."

" _ Good, _ " he says with a fresh bit of savagery, pouring in the warmed phial of catalyst.

Lily picks up her pace and reverses direction, counting passes clockwise in her head, and hisses across the cauldron, "Can you imagine how well  _ he _ would take it if he knew I waltzed out of your bedroom this morning?"

There's half a sneer for her, and a victorious look in his eye that Lily absolutely loathes, as if he delights in the horror this information could bring Sirius. Or worse, something closer to Sirius' original suspicion of  _ really winning her from James _ . 

She doesn't want to inspect that thought further.

His wand begins a rhythmic tap against the edge of the cauldron, one for each pass of her stirrer now that the catalyst has been added. The pewter glows with each tap. "I'm unconcerned."

"I need you to be concerned," she grits out. "We need Sirius on our side and if he thinks anything-- _ untoward _ \--is happening, we lose him." She has no idea why she goes pink when all that's really happened is a vigorous night of bloody  _ hand-holding _ and rather a lot more of much-needed sleep. It feels so completely stupid that it only makes the embarrassment worse. On the tenth pass, she stops stirring and he stops tapping the cauldron. "There are things we oughtn't let him know."

His eyes go colder, more dismissive, but the sneer stays as he turns profile to reach for a stem of dark mullien flowers. "There is nothing to know."

" _ Isn't _ there?"

She wishes she could snatch the words and clap them back into her mouth the second they're out. She meant it as a threat, as something that could only hurt him and never her, but it doesn't quite come out that way, and he's heard it too. He stills, one flowerbud crushed between his fingers and ready to drop into the potion between them. His eyes are glittering and opaque as polished stone. Her own fierce glare is lit from below by the soft luminescence of the potion.

There's only a breath standing there, staring at each other, until Sirius' loud footfalls make the turn at the top of the stair, and then it's over. Everything goes back under the ice. The flowerbud drops from his fingertips into the cauldron, and she resumes stirring at the same steady, measured pace as before, this time counterclockwise.

"I know you take it sweet, Lily, so I brought a sugar bowl," Sirius says as he enters, holding the tray before him. Two cups, she notes--not the point where he can stand serving tea to the lot of them, but that would be asking for a miracle.

"Thanks, Sirius. We'll just be a minute more." 

In silence, more crushed flowerbuds drop in, one for each revolution. After eleven, they pause in sync, drawing back from the cauldron. The smell of damp flowers fills the room--all is going right, so far.

"And now we wait," Lily sighs, taking the stirrer and wiping it clean on a towel before laying it on the bench. "It needs to simmer for a while, to let the catalyst take full effect."

"No," Severus says. "I will accelerate it."

"Don't. I looked up what that spell was and I don't like you doing it. We have the time."

"Is that what you were reading?" Severus says sharply, tiptoeing up to it, leaving unsaid the threat at end of the sentence--  _ in my bed? _

"Among other things." She turns, pours herself tea, sweetens it and takes a scalding sip. "It's not worth shaving years off your life for, at any rate."

"Hours, not years."

"The text supports both interpretations."

"The practice does not."

Sirius is watching them over his teacup like a tennis match, a sharp kind of interest on his face. "You're letting him use Dark magic to make this--thing?"

Lily slides her eyes sideways. "I  _ let _ him do very little. What he does is entirely of his own accord."

The rude bark of laughter Sirius lets out then is almost as surprising as anything that's happened so far.


	22. The Doe III

The thing that rises from the cauldron late that night does not come with the ears of a deer. So there is that, at least.

The legs don't work at first, but it doesn't make a sound or fight. They have to haul it up and out of the cauldron but the feet won't go under it properly so they begin cleaning the slime off it on the floor. The thing sucks at air once Lily clears her mouth of slime with a suction bulb and a rag but it doesn't say anything, just looks up at her like a funhouse mirror, with those unblinking green eyes.

"Lungs work," Lily says, taking another pass at the construct's face with a clean rag. "So that's something." She thrusts a finger into the thing's mouth and pulls down to open it up and inspect the teeth. "It still has wisdom teeth. I got those out years ago. So it's not a perfect copy."

Severus is standing over them both, eyes fixed on a faraway point while he casts a few rudimentary healer's spells. "She reads as human. Or close enough. There are a few irregularities."

"Like what?"

He crouches, and one long finger points just above the thing's bare left breast. "Her organs are reversed. Her heart is here, on the wrong side. The stomachs are--multiple." His finger trails lower to point to where the stomachs would be and Severus glances down and then away, suddenly embarrassed by the thing's nudity.

"Don't be a prude, it's not  _ me _ . It's an animal."

The voice that comes next is unexpected, strange to Lily's ears, but familiar. "Not me?"

The construct reaches a hand to its own face, leaving a trail of residual gore everywhere its fingers touch. Then it reaches for Lily's face.

She catches it at the wrist. "None of that. Come on, let's get you washed up."

"You," it parrots softly, rising with Lily to its feet. The head swivels around to look at Severus. "You."

They could conjure a bath there, but it makes more sense to take it to the bathroom. It leans on Lily's arm heavily, sliming her shirt, and its feet slide but gain purchase as they move at a snail's pace toward the laboratory door. "It seems to be figuring out walking. Is it--wrong, do you think? If it can't take commands properly it won't work." Lily asks, disappointed.

"You think," it says.

Severus opens the door out of the laboratory, eyes still unwilling or unable to look at thing below the hollow of its throat. It gives him an artificial haughty air, one of looking down his long nose at the both of them. "She was never going to have precisely human intelligence, or yours. It's an accomplishment that she can speak at alll."

They each give a breath of time to offer the thing an opportunity to parrot him in between shuffling steps down the hall.

When it doesn't, Lily gasps out a little sound, half-laugh, half exclamation. "Oh! It only copies me. A side effect?"

"Me," it says, nodding slowly. It reaches for Lily's face again and she bats the hand away.

"Most blood constructs use only one variety of blood. The blend of human an animal is likely the culprit." His frown deepens. "Human blood is quite volatile."

"Of course it is, it's blood with opinions _. My _ opinions. Open the door for me, would you?" It's the room Bellatrix had stayed in with its ensuite bath like a swimming pool, but she doesn't trust the construct's legs on stairs yet to take it another floor up to her own room or Severus'.

The door swings open at a flick of his wand, and he looks in with suspicion. "Leave the door open. If you shout, I'll hear."

"You think it'll attack me? Come now. Would have already done." Lily laughs, disengaging it from her arm and taking it by both hands. It toddles across the carpet in her wake like a child unsure of their feet. "You'll do what I say, won't you?"

The thing is watching her, and then glances back at Severus looming in the doorway, and then back to Lily. "What I say."

"Good enough. Now let's get you in the bath and into some clothes so Severus doesn't faint, because he is an old lady who can't stand the sight of your bum." There's an indignant little noise made through his nose, but Lily ignores it. Lily navigates it over the bathroom threshold and lets it sit heavily on the closed toilet seat before turning on the taps. Everything will need to be scrubbed clean; maybe the construct can do it herself, though that seems optimistic just now. "Sev, could you bring me some of the servant's stuff from my room? I'm going to keep talking to it. Maybe I can get it up to a full sentence, if not an original thought."

Working shampoo through its hair, Lily babbles her way through a half-remembered child's story to the thing, and it pipes up occasionally to mimic a new word or phrase--river, dead, magic, princess, toad, climb, run. She's more like a child than Lily is entirely comfortable with, and Lily slips into motherhood with unremembered instinct. When her eyes water with shampoo she shushes and gentles the thing, rinsing them clear until it stops cringing. When the construct is dry, there are clothes hanging there--testament that Severus came, watched her work, and left in silence. The path of mess it trailed is gone up to the threshold of the bathroom, too, and she can easily spell the last of it away while the thing stands there dripping. Drying the thing is easier than dressing it; the fingers keep trying to help but only succeed in getting in the way on the buttons. It's only when the thing is dressed and standing before her, a wide-eyed and blank mirror, that Lily takes in the full impact of how very strange this is.

Over her shoulder, she says, "You can't sneak up on me, you know. You've done it too many times and I learnt all my sneaking at your sneaky knee." She turns back to the construct. "This thing is  _ weird _ and I don't envy you staying with it."

Severus comes out of the doorway where he was lurking and says, "She's no stranger than a house-elf."

Green eyes track both of their faces. "Envy," it says slowly.

"House elves are weird, too. After we win the war I think I'll make a study of them."

He cuts a glance to her, inquiring. "Why? They are an ancient race, adapted for wizard use."

"Sentient beings,  _ adapted? _ Oddly enough, I think I've gone a bit sour on the very idea of slavery of sentient creatures. At least this thing isn't quite all the way there." Lily turns to face him. "Thank you. For helping me do this. It's--for all how strange it is, it's incredible we've managed it."

"It would seem I am a suitable substitute for a team of apprentices," he replies dryly.

"Better. A thousand times." There's real warmth in her voice, because it's true. Turning back to the construct, she enunciates, "I am going to show you to your room, okay?"

"I am," she says, but she nods as well.

The construct can walk ably enough now, so Lily leads it up the stair to the room--her room. The dark bare cell greets them from the hall, and its eyes look fearful until they both pass the threshold and the meadow Severus has made is clear. It lets out a little gasp, sinking slowly to its knees, skirts ballooning around her.

Lily looks over her shoulder and there Severus is, black spectre trailing them, watching, the ghost of a pleased smile flitting his mouth. She snorts with derision, but the wonder on the construct's mirrored face is real, and it reaches out to one of the flowers. At its touch, it blossoms rapidly, releasing scent into the air.

"I suppose it doesn't know everything I do. Or it hasn't sorted through everything. A lifetime of being a human is probably a lot for an animal to work with." Lily herself wouldn't be so impressed with flowers she already knew of, and Lily wasn't overly impressed with them the first time. She had been sick on them, if she recalled correctly--that stage of recovery from the memory charm had been thoroughly messy. Lily turns her attention back to the construct. "You stay here. This where you sleep. This where you go when Severus doesn't need you. Do you understand?"

The thing ignores her, reaching to another flower, and then a third, plucking it. It looks at the bloom in her hand, and then up at Lily, and then twists its body, pivoting on one inelegant hand to peer at Severus.

"Lily," it says.

"That's a violet." 

"Lily," it repeats, this time with more confidence, looking back up at her. "Lily."

Lily casts her gaze over her shoulder. "I didn't say that. Neither did you, I don't think."

"She is learning."

"You keep saying  _ she _ . It's mostly a creature with a brain the size of a plum that happens to be human-shaped. It's not a  _ she _ any more than a cat or a boat is."

"Lily, Lily, Lily," it chants, and then stops and shoves the flower in its mouth.

"Oh, for the love of--" Lily crouches, moving to stick her fingers in its mouth and remove the flower, but the thing claps both hands over her lips. "Well, at least violets aren't poisonous."

With a petal stuck to its teeth, the thing looks up, wide-eyed at him. "Severus," it manages.

Something not entirely unlike anger, something that has been sparking for a few minutes now, finally ignites. Lily returns to her feet. "All right. Go to sleep here. This is your room now. Obey Severus and don't get either of us killed." She strides through the door and shuts it behind her, almost bashing Severus' nose straight into his brain.

She's almost halfway up the hall, striding fast, when she hears his footfalls track behind her own. Her body whips around the corner of the stair that the banister she uses for leverage gives an almighty creak at her velocity.

All her things are already packed right down to James' invisibility cloak, ready to go at a moment's notice in the magically expanded bag in her boot. That room holds nothing but flowers and a woodland animal. And she  _ wants _ this, wants to chase horcruxes and destroy them. But this anger pushes at her certainty.

The bed Bellatrix slept in still feels like a place that will only entreat nightmares, but the library will do well enough, and there are spare blankets in the hall closet. She sets up on her favorite chaise to read and nap on, padding it deeper with pillows and blankets summoned from the linen closet.

A new blanket drops near the head. A dark green one, the one she knows, with a pale hand atop it. "Regulus has found a suitable dog to place under the Imperius curse in order to replace his brother's animagus form. While you were working, I moved the doe to the cellar and put it to sleep. It's hidden well enough, and anyone discovering it won't know what questions to ask."

"Good." She pauses, and then decides to go at it with brutal efficiency. "You've never handled a baby, have you? Or a toddler?" She punches a pillow to fluff it. "You'll have to watch that thing all the time. Teach it how to take commands, how to act. It seems tractible enough but eating flowers-- and have you managed to figure out how to heal it?"

"I have looked into it. I am reasonably certain a form of healing can be performed, though of course it would be best to avoid damage in the first place. I have no way of anticipating the reaction to pain." He pauses. "You intend to sleep here?"

"Yeah. Might as well get it used to the room it'll be staying in." She looks over at him. "Don't expect it to be me. It won't."

"Of course not." There's a little frown and he's staring at a spot on the wall past her face. "The thing that was  _ you _ tried to kill me."

She rolls her eyes at him and butts her shoulder against his, pulling a blanket up to the pillow. "The thing that is me is standing next to you."

"And leaving. Tomorrow, since the construct is functional, unless I overheard your planning with Black incorrectly."

He hadn't. It was all rather well done, in that uncaring and silken tone of his. "Eavesdropping, were you?"

"Hardly. Both of your voices carry."

Which means yes, at least a little bit. "We're headed to the coast. It's going to be lovely. I could use some sun."

"The coast?" The surprise in his voice is unusual, worth exploring.

"Have to start somewhere." She smooths the covers and the bed's made, now, green blanket and all, so she sits on it and peers up into his face. "Why, do you know something?"

He looks like he's said more than he meant to, and his frown deepens. "Helena Ravenclaw was murdered in a forest."

Lily splutters. "Murdered? A forest? I--how do you know anything about it?"

"A very long time ago a ghost told me a story." His eyes focus on hers, sharp, and his arms fold across his chest, closing himself off. "It was meant to be-- _ educational.  _ A deterrent."

She looks at him, uncomprehending. "When was this?"

"We were sixteen."

She reaches backward. The ghosts of the castle, the only ghosts either of them had ever met, and that transparent and silent man, doused in a silvery and unspoken crime. "Who, the Bloody Baron?"

He nods. "He murdered her."

She stands again, furious. "And you only saw fit to mention this now? Which forest, Severus?"

The frown turns into a full-blown scowl, now. "I don't know. It was not the primary subject of our conversation."

"Oh, yes, you just talked to a notoriously intractable century-old ghost and it just so happened to come up that he had murdered the daughter of one of the Founders and by the way have you seen how the Harpies are doing this season? Was that it?"

"No," he spits.

Lily throws up her hands in exasperation. "Then what  _ was _ it? Why were you talking to him? What was he trying to  _ educate _ you on?"

"He was one of Helena Ravenclaw's suitors," he says, sounding as if the words are being dragged out of him against his will. "Rowena Ravenclaw sent him to her daughter. He tried to make Helena return with him from Albania. She refused. He killed her and then himself."

That version of events appears to leave out quite a bit, but she can piece it together well enough;  _ suitor  _ likely didn't quite cover it. And the warning it must have been, for him, at that age, that comes easy enough. She remembers him at sixteen staring transparently after her in a way even gentle Remus commented on. At the time, she'd assumed it was loathing, with all those other boys in Slytherin pouring poison in his ear. Now with the pensieve and her wand, everything he's said, everything he's  _ done _ for good or ill, she knows it was something rather different. But being stuck that way as a ghost-- "And they still haunt the same castle?"

If his glare were a physical force, she'd be dead. "He wears chains for it to this day."   
  


Lily snorts. "Oh, if that's the case I'm sure she's forgiven him then."

"And what would you have him do?"

The conversation isn't exactly about ghosts anymore--or, at least, not the long-dead ghosts haunting a school. "Something useful. Something that actually helps someone, maybe. I don't know."

She doesn't speak the sudden and virulent thought that there are some things that are beyond forgiveness.


	23. Over the River

Sirius arrives before dawn. It's all been arranged. Lily casts the disillusionment charm herself and Severus opens the door for them under the guise of some other travel that will take him elsewhere with crates of potion, giving them ample time to slip out.

Outside, Lily realizes that the snow has melted and spring has begun in earnest. Winter's bite still chases her ankles under her traveling cloak in the ethereal glow of pre-dawn, but there are stems bursting the last crust of ice over the earth. She tries to exhale through her nose so as not to make visible steam with her breath in the cold air.

Severus stands on the top step, looking like nothing so much as a hawk surveying a meadow of voles. She can hear Sirius descend, faint footfalls on the stair from the front door, but she isn't quite ready to follow him to the edge of the wards yet.

It's easier now that Sirius is invisible, too. She snakes one hand around Severus', interlacing their fingers for a half an instant, pressing a particular rolled scrap of parchment into his hand. She whispers toward his ear, "I've made you a gift." The words make a tiny cloud that caresses the edge of his cheek.

He can't respond. He won't break cover like that, not out where anyone could see--where Sirius can see. But his face inclines ever so slightly toward her position, his fingers curl around the parchment, and his eyes flick past her face as if he can see it. A bittersweet half-smile pulls at the edges of his mouth for a breath, as if he's just remembered something beautiful and long-gone, before he returns to impassivity.

Lily pulls her fingers free and follows Sirius to the walk. He fumbles for her arm, and she holds on tight as he steps forward and out of Cokeworth.

The crack of their appearance doesn't even much disturb the heavy air, warmer than Cokeworth by several degrees and thick with the smell of frozen and thawed rot.

"Ugh," she says, taking one full putrid breath and regretting it immediately. "Where have you brought me?"

"Near our place," Sirius says brightly. He glances up and down the alley to confirm they're alone, then removes a hand mirror from his pocket and directs his wand to his own face. The Disillusionment fades, quickly replaced by Transfiguration guided by the mirror; a lengthening of the nose, thinning of the cheeks, minor changes to make him appear more like his brother. Gray eyes flash up at her behind the transformations: "Lovely, innit?"

"No," Lily says, pulling the collar of her shirt up above her cloak to block the stench. "How do you stand this? Is this where you Apparate from?"

"Smells better to a person's nose than to a dog's, so by comparison to my usual it's roses," he says cheerily. His voice shifts mid-sentence to Regulus' higher, softer tone. "What, you've been sitting on perfumed pillows in that house so long you can't stand a little London?"

"Perfumed pillows?" Lily hasn't been in the city in years, but the offense is open on her face. 

Sirius snaps the mirror shut and tucks it away, straightening his robes on his thinned frame.  "It always seemed like you had it pretty good over there. Hardly any cleaning, hardly any guests, Snape not letting you in that lab where the real messy work gets done for so long--" 

With his wand trained on her, he began the changes. Her body stays the same, since her build isn't unusual; she was perhaps better-fed than the average muggleborn servant but the dress hides enough and Sirius hollows her cheeks to suggest less health than her body truly had.

"Sirius, you had no idea how I had it over there." She felt her nose snap to the side and re-set itself into the previously-broken, crooked shape they had decided on yesterday. 

"Snape lets you have run of the place. Reg won't even let me sleep in his bed and keeps me out of the roasts. Makes me clean up my own fur off the divan--" Her hair went mousy brown, eyes dulled to a murky hazel, and the alterations were complete: she was no one just as much as he was his brother. Sirius tucks his wand away and spreads his hands. "I'm  _ joking, _ Lily."

It seems to her that it is the kind of joke meant to probe at something real, but she lets it go. "How's that going, then? Regulus will have to pick up after his own pet."

Sirius moves to the end of the alley, and Lily follows a demure few steps behind. The streets are empty at this early hour, but he pulls his collar up to protect his neck from the wind. "Oh, it's sure to be hilarious. I'm sorry I'm going to miss most of it."

"I bet when you told him how to get dog fur out of velvet he almost fainted," Lily murmurs, watching both the street and Sirius from under her lashes.

Satisfied that they are unwatched, Sirius strides silently forth, flicking his fingers to beckon her on after him. "That's nothing. When it licked his face I thought it sucked his soul right out. Turns out Reg  _ hates _ real dogs."

The way Lily stifles the laugh is a thoroughly inelegant and unladylike snort, but it works better than letting out a peal of laughter on a silent, chilly street, even while looking like no one.

The transfigurations are mild enough that they will wear off slowly, and it was for the best given the depleted store of polyjuice and the uncertainty whether they would need it or, worse, if the Dark Lord would call upon their stock. Too much went to the construct and both she and Severus knew it. But Sirius is more than adept at the art to give them new faces, and that was enough.

The office they come to at the end of their brisk walk through the empty streets of London is small, stuffy, and overwarm. The hearth at the far end of the room is blazing and her cloak is still suited to winter. At the desk sits a small blonde wizard, yawning, chin on his fist.

Sirius slides a parchment across the desk silently, the skull-and-snake insignia on its corner glowing faintly.

The wizard at the desk completes a long and languorous yawn and then blinks sleepily at Sirius' transfigured face before giving a start. "Master Black?"

If the young man knew the difference between Regulus and Sirius, the arch eyebrow Sirius gives him now would give things away. As it stands, it merely serves to stir him to a flurry of action. 

"I'm so sorry--you see it's just the end of my shift, Master Black, I'm on the overnight and my relief is late and--I didn't mean to do anything--"

Sirius does an excellent job of looking bored more than amused. "The portkey?"

"Of course, sir. Right away, sir." He bustles away to a closet to rummage.

Sirius glances over his shoulder at Lily and flashes a grin.

Lily mouths back, knitting her brow in mock-seriousness:  _ Master Black! _

The little wizard bustles back in with a lovely, if slightly tarnished, candelabra. "I'm so sorry this is all I could come up with, it's not exactly--"

"It will do," Sirius says, all flat business once more.

"--of course, I didn't mean to imply--I mean, of course." The strained smile on the man's face looks brittle, at the verge of shattering. He approaches the desk again and lifts the parchment, eyes scanning it without reading it more than once. "Brussels, is it? Quite a ways! What could possibly take you to Brussels?"

A slow, deliberate glance over his shoulder towards Lily, whose eyes were downcast and humbled once more the second the man emerged from the closet, and then his gaze fixes the wizard again. "Business," he says coldly. The implication is clear, and the answer utterly obfuscated.

"Right!" the wizard says, his voice a nervous squeak. "Of course! And everything here looks in order with the consulate there." He lets out a nervous titter, passing the candelabra from one hand to the other. His eyes move downward and he seems startled to be holding the thing still. He fumbles his wand once, twice in the stiff stillness of his own tension, and taps the candelabra. " _ Portus." _ It flashes a sickly yellow, and he shakes his wand out, looking concerned. "I'm sorry, I--I don't think that took right. The feeling isn't-- _ finite. Portus." _ The sickly yellow again, and that nervous titter again, even higher in pitch and twice as brittle. "I'm so sorry, it doesn't seem--"

"Take a breath, man," Sirius says in a clipped tone. "Perhaps more than one."

"Quite!" He lets out a breathless little laugh. " _ Finite _ ." He takes in one deep breath, then another, and then says quite firmly, " _ Portus. _ "

The candelabra glows a bright, affirmative green. Looking relieved, the wizard sets it on the desk between them. "Thank you so much for your patience, I'm just a little nervous, it's not every day that--"

Ignoring him, Sirius reaches back casually and takes Lily's wrist in a firm but not unkind grasp. He puts her hand on the portkey at the same time as his own. A violent tug, and they are pulled out of the office--

\--and into a new one, similar, dark, overwarm, both hands on the candelabra, where another wizard simlarly shaped but brunette, this time, starts to his feet, cursing in incomprehensible Dutch.

A green light from his desk interrupts him and, burning in reverse, the parchment Sirius had slid across the desk in London appears. At the sight of the glowing insignia, the man halts completely.

Sirius releases her wrist and sets the candelabra down firmly on the desk, waiting for this new attendant to complete his perusal of his paperwork. This one looks up more than once, not recognizing Regulus on sight, but he does recognize the name--or at least, the skull and snake.

"Ach. My counterpart in London failed to send the documentation ahead. My apologies." His English is accented, but easy, and he is less flustered. After a moment, he speaks again. "Everything appears in order here, Master Black." 

Sirius nods, gives a gesture to Lily, and sweeps out the door.

Brussels is a close-packed city, old and steep and decorated the way Muggle cities swollen with commerce had become after the statute of secrecy locked magic away from the populace and fear of consolidation--fear of errant Fiendfyre, fear of a sleeping geas, fear of an end that could not be defended against--had left them.

That fear returned, it's clear. It had returned in broken windows, in flags above the parliament replaced with a snake that twined lazily around a glowing skull. Dawn breaks across the city and still the streets are almost empty. Those that move are small, quiet, hunched. No one is willing to see their faces, which renders their disguises nearly superfluous. You can't be forced to inform on your neighbors if you refuse to see them.

It's a mile, if Lily had to guess, and then two, winding an indirect path. They duck into alleys to Apparate twice. Her boots chafe at her little toe. The seam in the end of her socks rubs uncomfortably across her feet. Housework may have kept her nimble and from going to rot--muscles in her arms could attest to the weight of sodden laundry done by hand on a washboard--but it hadn't done much for her endurance.

Sirius doesn't look back, not once, until they come to the edge of a long street. Neighborhoods have been declining by degrees, into a new kind of decay that Lily suspects predates the war. The windows are shuttered and then the buildings become vast and windowless. It reminds her of Cokeworth, in a way, of Spinner's End and the indelible stain the mill left on all the houses. She had only been there a few times--once, when Severus was sick; a few times one summer in the dead of night to work on spells; once, in the summer she was seventeen, the week after the Hogwarts Express had left them at the station, to silently return a book she'd found in her trunk. He'd slammed the door in her face and the doors, here, look like that.

There is a low brick building across from a train track and Sirius performs a piece of complex wandwork before the door. Glancing up and down the street, he performs a knock: twice firmly, a pause, three times, another pause, and then two more.

A slit opens in the door, exposing narrowed brown eyes. "And you would be?"

His face is Regulus', still, but the grin is all Sirius, sly and preening. "A friend," he says. 

The voice replies, sharp, "We haven't seen one of those return in quite a while."

It's some kind of coded passphrase, Lily understands. She remembers this.

Sirius says, "That's the nature of the phoenix."

The eyes flick over his shoulder, finally, to Lily's changed face. "And that one?"

He isn't expecting that. "Her? Don't worry. Trust me, you'll be glad to see her."

The eyes don't look less suspicious, but the woman behind them does unlatch the door, and they enter.

The place must have been a warehouse or a factory; the building is split into two floors, utterly unmagical, no expansion, nothing to speak of, with chipping paint covering the brick in a dingy gray. There are makeshift beds on top of a large kitchen, and stores and supplies shelved as far as the eye can see.

The woman knits the wards Sirius undid up behind them faster than should even be possible. She's short, square, red-haired and frowning. "A new one? We've nothing arranged, but we have the room just now, but not for long. How long will she be staying?"

"I'll be taking her with me, actually."

"And where are you headed, then?"

"Business." His wand passes over his face and the Transfiguration fades, replacing itself with his real face, the smile there now better suited to the features. "It's the real thing, Molly, something real we can fight for instead of holding ground, but we can't tell you the details. We're only stopping through for brooms."

_ Molly. _ That struck a gong under the dark and impenetrable lake of her past. But the last name, that had changed and she knew it, she could hold on to that-- 

"Molly  _ Weasley?" _ Lily asks.

The sharp brown eyes are back on hers again, narrowed, untrusting. "And where would you have heard that name?"

"I don't know." And it's the truth; while the years 1979 to 1981 have started to surface, slow and murky as seen through water, Molly's face is different. She's harder now than she ever was, as if the soft woman she'd known at Order meetings (sitting next to a hole in her memory, an emptiness that laid its hand on her knee) had been a clay mold for this woman before her.

Sirius moves close to her. "Hold still," he says, and his wand passes over her, and she can feel her face changing back to her own.

Molly Weasley lets out a gasp and very nearly drops her wand. "Lily? Lily  _ Potter?" _

She shrugs, giving a crooked smile with as much truth as she has. "So I'm told."

"I thought--oh, Merlin's beard, we weren't sure, I thought you were cursed or worse--living all this time under the thumb of that detestable Snape boy--" She flings her arms around Lily's neck as though they're old friends.

Lily stiffens, but lets it happen. She had been prepared to keep their purpose secret easily enough; she hadn't been prepared to meet half-remembered friends who recalled her a wife and mother when she herself did not. Over Molly's shoulder, she cocks a brow at Sirius:  _ does she know? _

A tiny, almost imperceptible shake of the head, and there's a smile on Sirius' face but it's rigid, and the mirth has evaporated from his eyes.

Molly's been babbling into her shoulder, and finally pulls away, saying, "Aren't you just a sight. Look healthy, too, that's a relief he isn't starving you. Half the girls come through here looking like they've just survived a famine." Molly glares over her shoulder at Sirius. "That's how I go through so much so fast, by the way, and be sure to let your brother know _. _ Either get his friends to start feeding them or expect me to keep running out. I won't ration them, not after what they've been through. I'd sooner go hungry myself." Her hands are smoothing at her apron. "But why are you here, both of you?"

"Like Sirius said," Lily picks up. "Business. Sorry. Can't tell you any of it, it would put everyone in danger."

"Of course, of course. But--does this mean you've managed to get Snape under the Imperius, then?"

Lily smiles, and touches a finger to her lips to imply a secret, and it's for both Molly and Sirius. "He's tractable."

" _ Good, _ " Molly says with a sudden fierceness. "Good. You know what he's done more than any of us. Anything short of the Killing Curse is too kind by half."

This line of conversation is dangerous; much as she might agree with any criticism levied at Severus' character--and there are several that leap to mind--she certainly doesn't want him dead. He's useless dead.

Sirius interjects. "Much as we'd love to stay and eat your cooking, Molly, we need to keep moving if we want to get where we're going. The brooms?"

"Of course, of course." She bustles away.

From the second floor, through a railing, a small and freckled face is peering down at her, chewing absently on a finger.

"I forgot, I'm sorry, I should have figured she'd remember you," Sirius is murmuring in her ear, but Lily holds up a hand to stop him.

"Hello," Lily calls to the boy at the railing. "What's your name?"

"This is Ron," another voice calls behind the boy. Still a child's voice, exuberant, curious, and a face to match overtopping his younger brother. "And I'm Fred!"

Another one, to match the second, identical, punches the first on the shoulder. "No, I'm Fred!"

"Boys!" Molly calls up warningly from somewhere deep in the warehouse.

"She said hi first!" the first Fred cries.

Lily means to support their claim but she can't take her eyes off the smallest one, the one staring at her. He looks about three, maybe a little skinny for his age but growing apace. He's the same age as the Malfoy boy. The same age as--

"Don't mind them," Molly says, returning with two brooms in tow. "They know to hide, they don't make too much noise. Bill keeps them in line well enough."

Inside herself, she reaches for something, anything; a memory of weight in her arms, a cry from a crib, anything to help her bridge the chasm of loss opening inside of her. There's nothing there to reach for, it all runs through her hands like water, but staring at the boy she realizes there is another woman there inside of her, another Lily with her eyes open and weeping and watching the boy through her own eyes. The room goes hazy. Tears, she realizes, drawn from that dark and deep wellspring of forgetting inside her, drawn in place of memory.

Lily freezes it over without even meaning to.

Lily swallows once, twice, not looking at Molly, but her mouth's gone dry. "How old are they?"

Molly's face melts to pity, which is detestable but better than the alternative, and her eyes go to whatever is happening on Lily's face to Sirius and then back to Lily's face, which she can't even feel right now. "Oh, you poor dear, I'm so sorry, I didn't even think--  _ Boys! _ Back to your rooms now, on the double, we have grown-up things to discuss."

"We're grown-ups, Ron's the baby!" But the two Freds retreat as a party, tugging the smallest behind them. Lily watches the youngest disappear and something inside her goes back to sleep again.

There's a moment of silence, listening for the small feet padding backwards into the makeshift bunks. "The twins'll be six this year, and Ron will be four." Molly's voice is low, sweet, kind as balm, and Lily hates it. "Ron and Harry would have been--"

"I know," Lily says, unable to stand another pitying word. It comes out tighter than she means it. She focuses on Molly, forcing out a smile that doesn't even convince herself. "Thank you."

A few minutes later, they are disillusioned and on the brooms, rising into the mid-morning sky in silence together, leaving the tiny brick box and all its children behind.

"The way you looked at those kids, I thought you were going to kidnap the lot of them," Sirius says easily.

"Considered it. I think I'm probably a rubbish mother, though." It's easier to say, here, to an invisible man flying next to her, with the wind pulling at her hair.

"You weren't," Sirius says.

"Good mothers don't let their children get killed." 

They're flying low and slow and close together enough to hear the shock in his voice. "You didn't--that wasn't your fault."

Lily longs for a change in subject. "That man in London seemed scared of you. Of Regulus, anyway. Why?"

She can't see him at her side, but she can hear him wondering if he's going to let it pass. He does, with confusion in his voice. "He's a Death Eater."

"Don't be dense. That's not the only reason for all that fear. Is Regulus particularly vicious or something? I can't imagine that."

"Course not. Just--well, imagine how it looks to someone who doesn't know."

The wind pulls at her hair while she does. "That warehouse looked fitted out to hold at least a dozen, and to supply a great deal more for travel."

"The bed situation was a little optimistic, but it's good for when we can grab a whole family, or a blood-traitor couple, or a child and muggle siblings."

That brings things into sharper focus. "So they all assume he's Macnair with more vile tastes."

The sound of disgust Sirius makes deep in his throat makes her laugh. "Keep things below his level and Regulus will only be considered the  _ second _ most heartless, depraved man in all of London."

"What was that about children and siblings? I think that qualifies as most depraved."

Sirius lets out a curse. "That's disgusting."

"Well, what else is there to think?"

"Reg is a researcher, not a--  _ deviant. _ That's his place in all of it, in the books. Researching ancient artifacts of power, going back in bloodlines, legitimizing people as wizards or not."

Lily mutters darkly, "Yes, I'm sure that's never got anyone killed."

Sirius' tone turns nasty. "Not as many as Snape's poisons. Not as many as the polyjuice, or the people he saved with that cursebreaker potion he dreamed up who went on to kill more of the Order, or any of the rest of it."

"And what would a researcher need to go through so many servants for, then?"

If Sirius were visible, she's sure he'd be scowling. "Experiments," he says eventually. 

His reluctance is worth pulling on. "Like what?"

"For a long while Reg was told to figure out how to remove magic completely from a muggle-born and put it into something else--a crown or a wand, a muggle, another wizard. He didn't try, just shipped them off and said they kept dying. Texts supported that, anyway. But that work petered out about a year ago in favor of looking for artifacts, working with them, and that's…"

She waits for him. She can be patient. They duck a flock of birds emerging from a copse of trees. Once they reach altitude again, her patience pays its due.

His voice is grim. "Ancient artifacts tend to have ancient curses we can't even begin to unwind, not even with the two of us. Sometimes the only solution is to discharge the curse on someone and hope we can heal them."

And there it is: the chess game again. Pawns sacrificed in the name of appearances. "Of course."

This is an argument he's had before, it's clear, but he's still angry at the vile compromise. "We can't give him  _ nothing. _ "

"I know." The blood shed at Beauxbatons is on her hands too. It was, after all, still a poison, and she had brewed it. "And who makes the decision? Who decides who takes the curse?"

"They do," he says, but it comes too quickly. "We don't ask anyone to do anything that--"

The trap closes. "Oh, you don't ask, but you offer options, is that it? 'Touch this cursed crown, suffer the consequences, and maybe we can see if we can get you and your children to safety?' What exactly do you think Severus offered me?"

"It's not-- what?"

"What do you think Severus offered me, when he locked it all away behind the memory charm?"

Sirius seems to be stymied by this. "Didn't think he'd asked at all," he says finally.

"He did." Well, Severus says he had, and she believes him. Knowing the memory charm was breaking, if it were a lie, he'd know it to be a lethal lie to tell, and Lily trusts Severus' cockroachy sense of self-preservation more than her own mind most days. "Know that, before you go off next time on what he's guilty of. There's a list but that isn't on it. The rest--he's making the same calculations as you two are, I'd reckon. So if you deserve indulgence, so does he."

Sirius grumbles. "An inquisition, is this?"

"No." She keeps her tone even, offers up something he'll like the taste of more. "You won't refuse me or stay quiet or storm off, so I ask. You're not Severus."

"Is that what he does?"

The truth will serve. "Sometimes. Generally after he's let something slip that he didn't mean to, or after I've given him a good verbal thrashing."

"Sounds about right."

It's a nothing-statement, practically an engraved invitation to further inquiry. "So you've got a muggleborn, they're ready to disappear. I can gather they go through Brussels from London. How long do they stay?"

"Long as they have to. Sometimes it takes months to get something set up elsewhere and chart a path, and we can't do it all ourselves."

"And after that?"

"Why, are you looking to compete? Start a smuggling business as well?"

It's been so easy to get information out of him up to this point that she's a bit surprised at his sudden resistance. "No. Wouldn't make sense for Severus to start going through muggleborns when he's been satisfied with the same one all this time. It'd draw attention." 

"Then why are you so curious?"

Because Severus won't tell her enough, and there's no other safe way to know. To fix this world she has to know its face. "I'm thinking about what happens if we have to run. All the packed bags in the world don't help us if we don't have somewhere to go."

He considers for a moment. "Australia's been safe, if you can make it there. Canada and the Americas are harder to get into. We've actually managed to get some goblins to help us truck them through to some safer parts of the Middle East, they get settled down properly there with a little bit of the Black gold to ease the transition. Goblins don't much care what the work is as long as they're getting paid for it, and our contracts are ironclad, Reg sees to that. Contracts are complicated enough to take a while to understand--all about moving goods, not specifying people--and I'm the signer so it doesn't run directly back to Reg if some rat busts into Gringotts and starts going through the paperwork." His voice dips, and he must have dropped to skim a copse of trees before returning to her side, leaving branches whipping in his wake. "Can you believe, though, the Americas and the Soviet Union are still going at it? Proxies, of course, but you'd think with the Statute blown they'd care more about magic."

"Has it really been blown?"

"What, the Statute of Secrecy? Of course. You can't take over half of Europe and maintain that level of deception. Not enough Obliviators in the world, and too many cameras these days."

Lily chews on that. All the fuss and bother--all her summers spent  _ not doing magic _ when all she and Severus wanted to be doing was  _ magic _ \--and now it's over. Children doing magic in the streets, whenever they pleased, in sight of whomever they pleased.

Well. Not all the children. But there's something else to explore in that. "What about the muggles? It's not the Dark Ages, there are weapons--hydrogen bombs, nuclear bombs, things like that?."

"Oh, they tried that. Someone had enough sense to ask Reg to look into it, once the war got too big, during the planning stages of the Battle for London."

"And?"

"They fired one. Just one, after London was lost. Bunch of Death Eaters on brooms turned it into a whale and let it fall into the ocean. We heard he sent a very nice note saying the next would just turn around and head back to where it was fired from. They didn't try it again after that."

She could almost laugh. Muggle Governments were at least quick enough to not try playing checkers against an adversary playing chess. "And I imagine the other schools, over there, are probably in on things now? Protecting borders, shoring things up?"

"Probably. Not our department, though. Soviets liked it less, what with Durmstrang being in their bounds, but they seem willing enough to cede territory rather than fight another war on another front. You-know-who wants the rest of Europe first, anyway."

Of course he does. They fly in silence for a while. "So where to now? You said London, Brussels, but now where are we heading?"

"Frankfurt. Well--near Frankfurt. Little town called Hahn, Muggles used to have an air base there."

"And now?"

She can hear the shrug in his voice. "It's a sleepy little town that used to have an air base. The hangar is good to lie low in, it's where I went after-- bear north a little, we want to avoid this town."

Below them, the world is dappled with trees and houses and streets that seem to come in waves. Highways stripe the countryside but the further they get from Brussels the fewer they become, and the more wild the countryside is. A town will crest and then fall away beneath them; another church-spire will appear in the distance and disappear just as quickly, never seeming to come any closer. They gain and gain and gain altitude as the countryside becomes increasingly mountainous. They stop for lunch on a mountainside, trading sugared barbs over whose cooking is better, Lily's or Sirius' old house-elf's. By the time the sun is setting, Sirius has corrected her flight path more than once, and Lily is sore and exhausted from travel and talk. The pitted cement and desolate hangar with its solitary unflown military plane seem like a welcome refuge for her wind-chapped face.

She spends an hour stretching, and once it is well and truly dark she uses the ladder left sprawling on the cement to climb onto the wing of the plane. The aluminum is cool and smooth beneath her. Lily conjures fairy lights and unspools a tiny roll of parchment from her pocket.

She suspected she might find something there already, and she's right. A familiar ugly, spiky script is staring up at her, black as his eyes are:  _ Are you safe? _

Lily had always thought a quill and ink hopelessly fussy, so she's got something better: a biro, transfigured painstakingly from a butter knife dipped in ink and her memory of a ballpoint's inner workings. It had taken several tries to get right and it still spluttered ink distressingly like a quill could, but it served.  _ We've just come down after a long day of flying. I'm all right. _

_ D _ _ uplix duplicis, _ a simple note-copying charm, done over and over and over had side effects they had both discovered early on in their years in Hogwarts. The parchment goes warm, the charm carrying her words back to Cokeworth, back to Severus. If she knows anything about him--

And the words appear almost as soon as hers go. Of course he'd be watching, he probably tucked it up his sleeve so he could feel its heat when she wrote back. Sentimental.  _ Where are you? _

_ I'm not telling, that's shoddy spywork, _ she scribbles back.  _ How's the pet? _

_ She-- _ this scratched out in favor of  _ It is herbivorous.  _ Then _ , It sounds increasingly like you. _ A pause, a drip of ink quickly smudged away to a gray smear, and:  _ This house is very empty. _

Comfort is for children, and love letters go in the fire; that isn't what this parchment is for and he needs to know that.  _ That house has more than one soul in it, so there's no reason to be lonely. And if I have my way, a little more than that before once I get back. _

  
Lily waits several minutes--counting seconds until Sirius calls for her--but Severus doesn't reply. She hadn't realized storming-off was irritatingly possible on parchment, but it is. It's only now, with Sirius beckoning her down, with fairy-lights out and trying to sleep inside the echoing hangar, with the parchment tucked up her own sleeve that she realizes; she misses him, too. It's sentimental. Foolish. And something else says,  _ mine, _ and half asleep in a little town in Germany, Lily cannot help but agree.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIVIA: the working / joke title of this chapter was "ROAD TRIP!!!!!!!!! (racing flag emoji) (racing flag emoji) (racing flag emoji) (dog emoji)"


	24. Through the Woods

The air base in Hahn becomes an abandoned shack in the outskirts of Nuremburg, where the weather warms; becomes a train to Munich in new anonymous disguises, Lily with dark skin beneath a stratosphere of curls and Sirius' face square and blunt and bald ( _ This city is beautiful, Severus--I don't know where you are, so I can't say I've been--I'll tell you later, I've just had the best pastry I've ever gotten from a traincar) _ ; another train and another set of faces to Salzburg where they stay the night in a run-down hotel on the outskirts of town ( _ Severus, I'm going to come back smelling of cabbage after sleeping here--I shall prepare a quarantine)  _ and Lily spends over an hour washing her body of four days of travel.

As they traveled, Lily and Sirius have gone down the list, between them, of their classmates and the Order members, their faces floating clear to the surface of her memory. It's a grim accounting. The best among them are missing or dead--most the latter. Her old friend Mary Macdonald was charged with some new crime and executed for putting up a fight while trying to flee the country; Edgar Bones and his family were murdered in their home, though there are rumors Amelia made it out; the Prewetts, Molly's own twin brothers, had been killed, and Lily surprises herself by remembering them, their enormous laughs, the silence their absence had left almost as vast as the silence at her side with its hand on her knee, snipped cleanly away from the memory; Emmeline Vance had gone to ground at the same time as Alice and Frank Longbottom and their child, which no one thought connected until Vance turned up dead the next year along with Alice after a skirmish with giants. Their child--another child the same age as Harry--was either dead or in hiding, somewhere, with his father.

( _ Is my mother alive, Severus?--I don't know.--Is my sister alive?--I can't find that information without raising too many questions.--How many of us did you kill? _

He doesn't respond again until she writes the inverse beneath it:  _ How many of you did I kill? -- _ and he answers after a few hours with two numbers divided by a violent slash of ink, and it doesn't really matter which belongs to whom when the numbers are that close. Lily doesn't realize how badly she wanted the number to be zero on each side until she reads something that isn't.)

In peacetime, Lily and Sirius could take a train the rest of the way and then fly or apparate across the Adriatic; as it stands, Italy admits no one from either East or West Germany and there are sufficient wardings along the border that would be inconvenient to bypass. Lily buys old bomber goggles and scarves to protect her face from a charming old woman in Budapest. From there it is South on brooms, scarves wrapped across their faces and whipping in the wind. They pass slavic towns nestled in the hills, tripping into the USSR at some point Lily is unsure of, her knowledge of Muggle politics being woefully incomplete even before it was several years out of date and a war had utterly mucked up the map in her mind. Three more days of flying and camping, and they stopped in Dubrovnik for a meal not cooked over a campfire and another wash. Every night, a few messages exchanged with Severus on the parchment-- _ Where?--Not telling. The pet?--It eats the violets as fast as I can grow them.--  _ underneath, the current of  _ I miss you I miss you I miss you _ that she both can barely tolerate and cannot ignore and certainly does not want to feel as a warm glow nested in her chest every time she can see it pressed into the dot of the  _ i _ in her name when he writes it.

And finally, with spring sunshine warming their faces, they cross the border into Albania.

The map they carry has three vast swaths of forest that might contain the diadem based on all the information they could gather. The first forest is also the smallest, the furthest north; they canvas it in a day, Sirius dog-shaped and Lily Disillusioned at his side. There's no trace of dark magic anywhere, nothing that sets off their many and sundry Dark Detectors, nothing that stirs any of their spells, nothing for Sirius to sniff out but voles, and they make camp beneath a copse of trees as the sun sets.

"So. Nothing, but I guess it's always in the last place you look. How's the, uh--" Sirius gestures, passing a hand across his face. "The thing?"

"The thing?" Lily is summoning firewood into her arms for their stove inside the tent.

"You know. The--the thing sleeping in your bed back home." His face goes dark, and pauses removing the tent from his bag, growling, "Or maybe not your bed, come to think of it."

"At the pace Severus is writing me? I think he's quite sick of dealing with how stupid the thing is, even if he were taking liberties, which I'm certain he isn't. But he's not trying to chivvy me back to Cokeworth, if that's what you're looking for." She sets the firewood on the ground and the tent fabric is drawn up from where it's been packed with a flick of her wand.

Sirius grunts, "I suppose."

Lily and Sirius lift their wands simultaneously, and the tent spreads gently, the fabric unfurling. "If you can get the poles in, I can hold this," Lily says.

Sirius pushes one into the pocket designated for it, seating the pole in the ground and sending the ropes and stakes flying taut into the ground with a  _ thunk. _ "So what are you writing the git about?"

"He wants to know where we are, I'm not telling him. I think it makes him angry but he won't let it show."

Sirius nods approvingly. "Anything odd?"

She thinks back. So little of it has been relevant; she gives him little and in turn he gives her less. But there was something. "Actually, there was. He asked me about the Potter estate."

"The  _ Potter-- _ " Sirius curses as he catches a finger between two tentpoles. Shaking his finger out, he looks over at her. "Why didn't you say?"

She shrugs awkwardly, wand still in the air holding up the tent. "Didn't seem important at the time. I've been trying to work it out but I come up blank."

"What the hell could he want with the Potter estate?" Sirius muses, picking up a tentpole. "Not as if he could--" But his face adopts an abstracted look as if he's just put something together, and he throws the tentpole in his hand to the dirt and curses a blue streak.

Lily lets him run himself out, counting down from one hundred. She maintains the levitation on the tent, switching arms at seventy-six. When she hits fifty-three, Sirius goes silent and looks at her again, brooding.

"It's low, even for him," he says.

"Catch me up?"

Sirius runs his hand through his hair. "It's his, now. Snape's. The Potter estate belongs to him by right."

Lily doesn't bother keeping the incredulity off her face. "How do you figure?"

He bends, picks up the fallen pole, sets it in the dirt and in the fabric before answering. "It's all about line of inheritance. Lots of old families have their estates warded the old way--oldest son or oldest heir gets the family seat, and there's no fighting it, and if there's no one to inherit then it takes a team of cursebreakers to get in past the wards. That's how the Wilkes estate ended up going to the Carrows, if you didn't know about that--last of the Wilkes died off in the war and they hired the people to bust in so they could say they have an  _ estate _ like a proper Pureblood family that didn't buy its way into the Directory after the Statute by getting in favor with the Notts." He seats the second pole in the dirt with vengeance and it sinks several inches deeper than the other.

Lily tils her head. "For someone who doesn't buy in, you certainly know a lot about this."

Sirius stops moving. "Is that an accusation?"

"Just an observation."

"Here's another," he snaps, snatching another pole from the ground. "For someone who you think isn't such a bad bloke, Snape sure acts like a bad bloke."

Lily can't disagree with that. "You haven't gotten to what you think he's done. I don't even know where the Potter estate  _ is, _ and Severus hasn't hired any cursebreakers."

"That's the thing. He doesn't have to." Another pole, seated, and he takes up the last. "The Potters--senior, your mother and father in law--were more modern than all that, when they were alive. So they had the wards set up such that the line of inheritance was more flexible, kept up with modern law. Probably cost a fortune but they were insuring that someone--someone like  _ you _ \--would inherit even if they and James kicked off."

The tent falters, and Lily bolsters its height again as Sirius plunges the last tentpole into the ground. "So I own the Potter estate?"

Sirius sends the final stakes flying into the earth. "Not exactly. It keeps up with modern law, and according to modern law, you're not a person who can inherit. So my guess is that it's gone to the only person legally related to you who  _ can _ inherit."

Lily drops her arm and the charm at once. The tent fabric sags against the poles dangerously for a moment, but it holds. "Severus. He inherits everything."

Sirius watches her face and seems satisfied with what he sees there. After a moment of silence, he ducks his head. The tent falls into place before them, and the tug of magic before them tells her the extension charms are in effect. "The wards were also meant to admit me. As family, as an heir. Did it back when I got blasted off the family tree. They took me in." He rubs his hand across his face. "But legally, I died two years ago. Which means Reg probably owns it too. Should have thought of it earlier. I didn't--I mean, it happened so long ago."

It's a mess as far as apologies go but an apology isn't what she needs. They stand before the tent in silence as the last of dusk trickles from the sky. Lily wraps her arms around herself and shivers. It might be spring and they may have gone south, but without the sun it's still cold.

"What could they be doing with the Potter estate?" she asks finally, turning back to Sirius.

"I don't know. Anything. Everything. Could burn it down or blow it up or turn it into a hideout or--anything. I didn't know much about the house except the fact that it had a big enough backyard to fly one-on-one Quidditch." He shrugs. "We were kids."

"Anything of value? Not gold, but magically? Anything Regulus would be looking into, anything that--" she still doesn't know how to refer to the Dark Lord-- " _ he _ would be looking for?"

Sirius spreads his hands. "Like I said. We were kids. Anything like that would have been locked away. Maybe James would have told Dumbledore."

She hears what he hasn't said, bending to pick up the firewood. "Or me."

His lip quirks underneath his seven-days beard growth. "Or you, if you could remember it."

She nods, then ducks into the tent. "All right. What do you have in mind?"

Sirius looks bewildered as he follows her in. The lights hung along the inside of the tent illuminate at his behest. "What?"

He isn't keeping up. A flash of annoyance sears through her and she tamps it down, bending to cram the firewood into the stove. Showing him her temper--so like Severus', with the exception that she is capable of leashing it slightly more often--won't serve her here. "You want me to try? To remember the Potter estate?"

"How?"   
  


She rocks back on her heels and peers at him over her shoulder. "Maybe tell me about him. Tell me what I'm supposed to remember." She comes to her feet, pointing her wand into the stove and kindling the fire there. "Tell me what you know."

Sirius sinks slowly into a chair at the table, brow drawn together and fingers steepled before him. He's rubbing his chin with his thumbs, brushing through his whiskers while he thinks. She lets him do it.

The tent is modest in its expansion, just three rooms--a water closet lacking a crucial shower but at least sufficient to keep their ablutions from polluting the woods, a bedroom with two small but comfortable bunks, and a living area with a table, stove with hob, and a charmed cabinet to keep their foodstuffs cool. Sirius is just as useless at cooking as Severus is, so Lily puts water on to boil for pasta. Their excursion in the woods might not have turned up a horcrux, but she has the Herbology N.E.W.T. enough to know edible mushrooms when she finds them, and wild garlic scapes are abundant in spring, and that with some pasta brought from home and butter and cream bought in Salzburg makes a respectable enough repast.

Cooking has always been soothing for Lily; it reminds her of brewing, that calm and soothing act of creating a solution to a problem. And it is magic, in its own a way, the only magic she'd been allowed until recently. The garlic scapes frying in the butter fills the room with scent that speaks to home--all the homes she's ever had, all the people who have cared for her and she, in turn has cared for. Her mother, her sister, her friends, even the house-elves at Hogwarts, the house of Godric's Hollow for all its vagueness and disconnection, and--

It's odd, what a person can call  _ home _ , but she indulges in few long breaths of affection for that scowling slice of shadow in that cold mansion, too. It's warmer than she expects, and she doesn't seek to name the feeling, doesn't delve too deeply, but suddenly the  _ I miss you I miss you I miss you _ of Severus' missives don't seem so strange or so far away.

"Dinner's almost on," she says mildly.

Behind her, Sirius stirs, clears his throat. "I was the best man at your wedding."

Ah. That rather douses the whole feeling in cold water. Occlumency is so rote at this point it is a reflex, and she drowns the feeling in that river, freezes it under so deep she could forget his name. 

She marshals her face, before she turns with a heaping bowl of pasta in hand. She sets his before him and her own before her own place, twirling a forkful before she speaks. "What was it like?"

"Nice." He shakes his head, takes a bite, speaks with his mouth full. "Actually, it was better than nice. I'm pretty sure everyone cried."

"Even Petunia?"

Sirius wrinkles his nose. "She didn't show."

"Figures. She always hated magic." Not that Severus ever tried to make her like it. Not that Lily herself ever helped her sister understand. Lily pushes the guilt under; it's not the exercise they are performing just now. "Who did?"

"Your parents, James' parents. Me. Peter. Remus. A few of your mates I didn't know as well, like Mary." He swallows. "You and James managed to compromise. Did it half-Muggle and half-wizard."

"How was the party?"

"Subdued." Sirius shrugs, stabbing a mushroom. "It happened during a war. You did your first dance to some Muggle song you'd gotten James into. Wouldn't truck with waltzing and James always hated that kind of rubbish anyway so he did it to make you happy."

Lily tries to sift through what little she has of those years to find a melody, any piece of a refrain. She comes up empty. "Do you remember what song?"

Sirius looks far away and shakes his head. "Can't do it. Out of my range."

"Oh, come on."

He forks more food up, as if it can stifle the song. "It  _ is.  _ It's one of those muggle bands, all falsetto. I can't do it."

"Try." There's a moment of silence, a few more taciturn bites. "Try? For me? Please?"

Sirius swallows. "It went-- I don't remember exactly. But it was something about heaven. Nobody gets--"

Lily exclaims, a sound in her throat, and then pitches her voice up for the lyric. "Nobody gets too much heaven--"

Her voice quavers, and it's badly done even for an attempt, but both of them hear it, the notes she's reaching for, the words.

"Yes, that one." His eyes are lit up with the memory. "And then I made it play The Clash and your mother got quite cross."

Lily laughs. "Why?"

" _ I Fought The Law _ isn't exactly a tune for nuptials."

"Oh, god, she would hate that." She laughs again, forehead dipping to her arm. "What were you thinking?"

"James liked it. I liked it. Didn't go further than that." He gestures wide, careless, a bright fragment of the brash boy she can see in her mind's eye. "And then you got pregnant. Right away, almost, James was such a cad about it. You were  _ enormous." _

Her hand goes to her stomach. "Petunia and I were big when we were born. That last month was misery for my mother, especially with me." Lily wrinkles her nose. "She told me about it like she was pleased I got my comeuppance, that much I do remember." The memory is odd, muted, as if her body drops away below the neck, but she can reach it if she tries.

"James just about gave birth himself by the end. He barely let you walk up the stairs alone."

"I'm sure I loved  _ that." _

"You hexed him back down the stairs a time or two, yeah." He throws both hands in the air, pitching his voice up again in girlish pantomimed fury. " _ Honestly James! _ "

"Sounds about right." Lily lazily pushes a mushroom around the bowl. "And then what?"

"The usual--blood, screaming. James handed me your wand, looked like he was about to sick up his lunch on me. You cursed out the mediwitch so badly she almost left." He shrugs, playing with his fork. "So was told, anyway, I wasn't in the room. And then the baby came, and James asked me to be his godfather, and James cried and you threw a pillow at him for crying because it made  _ you _ cry."

She can't imagine it. Can barely hold the thought in her head. If there is a memory of that infamous agony, she can't touch it. There's no tears she can muster, no wisp of feeling to grasp. She settles for the only she can remember, a fragment so small it must contain everything: "Harry."

Sirius nods, looking through her again, far away and sad. "Yeah. Harry."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song I mention here as Lily & James' first dance is Too Much Heaven by the Bee Gees because 1. it came out in 1979 and charted very well 2. I like disco and 3. you don't get to escape from disco simply by being ~ cool. ~
> 
> And for Sirius--who I just listen to a Greatest Hits of The Clash for--I Fought The Law by the Clash was released in 1977. And you know he *would*.
> 
> Also also the airbase in Hahn did, in reality, turn into the Frankfurt-Hahn airport some time after the 80s.


	25. The Hiding Place

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the delay in this one, for those of you tracking my weekly chapter posting schedule; last week was a whirlwind and I've not been keeping as ahead as I should. I'm writing this as I post and I've been trying to keep one chapter ahead so I have time to work and also edit as I go, but I ran out of runway a few weeks back and this chapter wasn't completed to my satisfaction on Saturday of last week. Rest assured I've used the time to get further ahead and will try to stay on the weekly updates!

As nightfall approaches on their second day in Albania, they are almost halfway through canvassing the second and the largest of the three forests marked on their map when a dogshaped Sirius stops, quivering like he's just caught a scent.

"What is it?"

He just chuffs at her, still fixed on whatever has caught his attention.

"Come on. Tell me. People words."

The dog lets out two pants and then his head snaps left. In her pocket, the Dark detector lets out a faint buzz.

Lily curses under her breath and dives for a tree to hide behind. Brambles tear at her trousers, and she must be making enough noise to wake an army, but she's hidden a bit away and her wand is out.

There's a bark, but it's not a growling one, not a sound of aggression. Lily crouches and peers out to see Sirius bowing on his front legs the same way he does when he sees a squirrel or the rare other dog, tail a furious blur. And then legs, _human_ legs, a voice, and Sirius flashes back to human and he's standing so close to the other human that they must be fighting even though she could swear she can hear Sirius laughing--

A voice says, in a hoarse half-whisper, " _Padfoot?"_

Lily creeps closer, still hidden, and the Dark detector buzzes faintly again.

"--thought you were dead--" she can catch, in Sirius' mumble, thick with emotion.

The quiet, clear voice responds, with both warmth and suspicion in equal measure. "I thought _you_ were dead. It made the papers."

"Yeah, well. Can't believe anything the paper says these days." Sirius' legs turn away. "Lily, come out, it's all right."

She could strangle him. Well, the first step toward strangling him is getting out of this shrub. It's not as if she's terribly comfortable, so she stands, grunting a little, and looks across to--

A memory, vivid and present. On the Hogwarts Express, her fifth year, a brilliant gleam of the Prefect's badge on his shoddy robes, a smile on his scarred face as he sat across from her. And that same face now, aged beyond its years, smiling genial and only faintly surprised.

"Remus Lupin," she says. "As I live and breathe."

"As you do," he says kindly, but he doesn't take his eyes off the wand in her hand. "I didn't think you still managed it, what with the political climate being what it is."

"I could say the same of you." He always was quicker than Sirius in matters of subtlety. "How exactly did you come to be in Albania, then?"

"You never did mince words," he says. The genial smile goes rigid and stale on his face.

Her voice is no kinder. "Answer the question."

"Lily," Sirius says, almost pleading. "What are you talking about? It's _Remus._ "

Another person she's expected to remember. To love. But this isn't the same as Molly, and Lily doesn't shift her gaze or her wand. "Sirius, don't you find it interesting that he's here, given what we're searching for?"

"What she means is, given what I am," Remus says, gentle but not moving. This is a man who's been held at wandpoint more than once.

His word touches off something inside of her, locked away, and it bursts open in a spray of light like no other memory has: the still shadow of James, voice a garbled whisper: _werewolf._ And then, near the end--very near the end-- _We can't trust Remus. You know what he is, what kind of creatures Dumbledore has his spying on. It has to be Peter._

She has been happier not remembering that, not knowing that either of these two men before her could have been the Secret-Keeper to her happy home more than a traitorous rat. At least Pettigrew is dead. At least Severus had given him no mercy and delivered him unto less; the end of Peter Pettigrew's life had been drawn out and horrible at the hands of the his own Dark Lord.

(Something inside her lingers over the violence Severus must have committed before handing Pettigrew over. It sings, _mine mine mine._ )

"Well? Are you taking orders from Fenrir these days?" Lily says, stepping forward. Her voice is too loud, too wild, but it does make both of them flinch as she comes forward into the clearing.

Remus finally breaks eye contact and seems to crumple, hurt. "Lily, you know very well that Fenrir is the beast who turned me. I would never be loyal to him, not even at the cost of my life."

"Talk is cheap, Remus. Why are you here."

"Believe it or not, Lily, I am where Albus Dumbledore placed me before his death."

Sirius says, "See? Let's set up the tent and put some supper on."

Above, the pines sway in the dusk breeze. Sirius isn't wrong; they should be setting up camp, should be protecting the place where they intend to sleep and putting up the tent. Instead they are arguing.

"I'm actually quite curious why you are here myself," says Remus, trying for a sincere smile once more. He errs considerably wide of anything truly kind, seeing Lily's still-stony expression. "Last I heard, you had been abducted by an old friend of yours."

She stuffs it all under ice, wills her face impassive. "You don't know anything about it."

"Best let that alone," Sirius mutters to Remus, and turns back to Lily, trying to make a peace that won't come together. "Come on, Lily, let's set up."

"I'm afraid I can't let you do that here," Remus says slowly.

"And there it is," Lily mocks. "Why not?"

"You're in our territory, you see. It's good that I found you, I can make the proper introductions."

"To who?" Sirius asks, bewildered.

"To the pack, of course, and Nicolas." Lily and Sirius exchange a glance, and Remus is sharp enough to at least see it and read half of it. "You can't tell me you aren't here to speak with Nicolas, to ask his help."

"Of course we are," Lily lies smoothly. Remus isn't a fool but they don't have a lie ready and she'll cling to anything. "We didn't know he was with you and yours."

Remus' gentle expression goes a bit brittle, at that, and the discomfort-- _you and yours_ being werewolves, not themselves--glasses over all his suspicion with sublimated anger. He turns and gestures. "Come on, then. I'll take you to him."

Whomever Nicolas is, they mustn't be a danger to him. Lily looks at Sirius again, and he opens one hand at his side, as if to say, _you got us into this._ But they both follow.

It's a mile, maybe a little less, but with tired legs and cross-cut through territory they've already canvassed, the Dark Detector giving its soft vibration of Remus' proximity the whole way. Sirius tries to catch her attention with sly sideways looks but she can only shake her head; Remus' hearing is too good for that even if he weren't a werewolf, and it's hard to tell what's lore and what's real with Dark creatures these days. Sirius will just have to follow her lead, like she did when Molly asked too much. Lily wouldn't be here with Sirius if she wasn't confident he could do it, and if it's a trap they will have to fight their way out or fail in the attempt.

She clutches to the scrap of parchment in her pocket, to her wand. It isn't anything. It's nothing at all. Just a nervous tic, a hope for comfort of a comrade, nothing more.

They arrive to a massive clearing they had wound their path around before, and Remus finally stops. "Hold back. This is a bit complex."

The wards are similar to the ones they erected to keep Bellatrix out of the kitchen, but enlarged beyond meaningful comparison. As he unstitches them point by point, she files away their nature as best as she can see. This one, a disguise; that, repelling; another, a nasty deterrent.  Information is currency just as much as galleons, after all.

Remus' hands fall, and the Dark Detector begins to vibrate with new ferocity as a small village of ramshackle tents appear from nothingness. Remus threads his way through it with the familiarity of a native, past lean-tos and yurts, cookfires and quiet children minded by painfully thin adults murmuring in tight circles or withdrawing into their tents as they approach. All werewolves, or enough of them werewolves; every time they pass close to a knot of people the Dark Detector feels like it's about to start screaming and Lily can't shut it up without drawing more attention than they already have.

The village has the feel of a lived-in place despite the temporary look of the tents; dirt paths wend their way between the doorways as clearly as any lane Lily has ever seen in Cokeworth, and Remus leads them ever inward, well past what Lily's legs would guess are the end of the clearing. It's a powerful enchantment indeed, though not a terribly surprising one.

What is a surprise is the red spire of an improbable tent jutting from the center, narrow and commanding as a lighthouse. "I take it this is Nicolas," Lily says.

Remus says nothing, just scans her with his calculating gaze before lifting the entry flap to the tall red tent at the center of the tiny village. He can tell that something's missing, off--she almost fathoms that he can smell Severus on her, and the hand she gave him fists involuntarily as if it's guilty of more. Before Lily can dismiss the thought as ridiculous or bury it in ice, he's looked away, dropping the tentflap behind him.

Inside, the Dark Detector goes utterly silent--there are wards, good ones, strong ones, in the fabric of the tent itself--and a glowing red gem sits upon a plinth. Behind it, the man prodding at the fire looks precisely like his chocolate frog card. He hasn't aged a day, but of course he wouldn't have. She had run through all the Nicolases it could possibly be but never thought--

"Nicolas Flamel," Lily says, unable to keep the note of awe out of her voice.

Sirius curses, and then apologizes, and then curses again.

Flamel takes his time as they fumble, straightening with both grace and pain that only six hundred years of uninterrupted life can give and turns his benevolent gaze upon them. "You were expecting, perhaps, Father Christmas?" His English is softly colored with French, as though centuries had buffed away all but the gentlest openness around the vowels. "Lily Potter. Sirius Black. Albus warned me you might come. Please, sit." Flamel gestures expansively to a set of matched, slouching overstuffed chairs that dissolve into being limned in red sparks.

He's not even using his wand as far as Lily can tell. Even his conjuration looks different than anything she's ever seen before. Remus sits as if he's used to it, the red sparks, the centuries-old wizard and Lily realizes for the first time that she's not sure if Remus--or Flamel, for that matter--even _has_ a wand.

"Albus?" Lily asks, breathless.

"An old friend." A fleeting sadness tugs at his his mouth. "Still quite dead, I'm afraid, but he told me many things before he departed."

Sirius jerks his thumb towards the plinth. "Is that--?"

"Despite all reports to the contrary, yes." He laughs as he settles into a seat in the circle of armchairs, and it's a strange, musical sound. "I have kept the Philosopher's Stone from the grasp of Tom Riddle."

"And us," Remus adds quietly. He's still watching Lily, and he's clearly come to some kind of determination. "You lied, Lily. You had no idea Nicolas was here. So why are you in Albania?"

Lily sighs, putting her hand to her forehead and pressing her fingertips to her temples. "I could ask you the same question, and you won't answer for the same reason."

Remus' mouth thins. "The Eaten Ministry drove many werewolves into Fenrir's ranks, as I'm sure you well know. Those who refused to join found better luck fleeing. Nicolas is the only reason most of the people here have managed to survive. Did you know about us?"

"But this is brilliant," Sirius interrupts, excited. "This changes everything. We could work together, start getting werewolves out of the country along with muggleborns--"

Remus sounds exhausted. "We can barely feed ourselves without drawing too much attention. There are three wands between nearly a hundred and fifty of us, and hardly any magical training. I was lucky in that. Many others weren't. Nicolas and myself and a few others, we try to train where we can, but without wands these children are growing up almost entirely without magic to support them." Remus scrubs his hand across his mouth. "It's all we can do to keep their accidental magic from ripping each other or the woods to shreds."

Sirius comes around on him. "There are people suffering in England right now. What's your plan, wait here until you-know-who decides the peace with the Soviets is inconvenient and starts moving in on new territory? And then what, run further? It isn't sustainable."

"There are very few paths to sustainability. We are focused more on survival," Remus says wryly.

Lily interrupts their spat and comes back to Flamel. "You expect me to believe you were simply allowed to escape England with an artifact like _that?"_

Flamel nods along. "Of course not. But we keep a tenuous peace, Tom Riddle and I. He knows, approximately, where we are. He believes that I can be coerced into relinquishing the Philosopher's Stone to him at some point in the future, and he does not feel he has the need for it now. He does send the occasional emissary." He pauses. "Are you an emissary for the one your friend calls the Dark Lord, Lily Potter?"

"How _dare_ you," Sirius snarls. Lily's never felt so grateful for him.

Flamel continues on with the ease of the uncaring. "And yet you reek of him. You both do, but you most of all, Lily Potter."

She feels increasingly like a child being scolded by a teacher and it grates. "I can't help that. We live in his world, not in some forest in Albania."

Flamel leans forward, steepling his fingers. "Do you understand why Tom Riddle is dangerous, Lily Potter?"

Flamel is focused on her, so she must take point. Fine, she has answers to this, answers even that Sirius would like to hear. "He enslaves. He uses violence. He kills."

"You have killed, Lily Potter. As have Remus and Sirius. As have I, in this and other conflicts across the ages." Flamel's hands open and another shower of red sparks give way to an earthenware mug that fills itself with something that steams. "Every war has its price in blood and this war is not so unique as you might like to think."

Lily opens her mouth to retort, but Flamel raises a palm to silence her. "Oh, yes, Tom Riddle is violent, naturally. I do not seek to minimize his crimes. And the treatment of muggleborns is reprehensible. But these are equally merely a means to an end. They enable him to destroy intractable resistance and intimidate those contemplating the same. It is not what makes him truly dangerous."

"Then what?" Sirius asks, bursting with frustration. "What else is there?"

Flamel smiles at Sirius. "He offers dire consequence in one hand, which you are familiar with, but the greater hazard lies with the rich reward in the other. Without that he is merely a warlord. With it, he can convince individuals to hand over their power without even suggesting violence. Once they do so, he is capable of convincing them that doing so is not only in best interest, but also that the life they lead in his thrall is better than the one of freedom. Frightened and starved armies desert, mutiny, and defect. But the well-fed are just as faithful as the zealots. He is persuasive. Charming, even, able to allay fears in his allies. The danger he poses is not one to life and limb, but one to the mind and soul." He takes a sip from the mug, returning his piercing gaze to Lily once more. "I believe you both know very well the damage that Tom Riddle can do to a soul who submits to him willingly."

"Regulus is different," says Sirius, with a certainty borne of love.

(Lily wishes there was that kind of certainty in her heart. There isn't.)

"Is your brother so different?" Flamel asks. "Certainly Tom Riddle's forces are replete with those simple monsters like your hated Fenrir or Macnair, but there are more like your brother and Severus Snape who sought power, acceptance, exultation, and society. These are natural desires, utterly human; Tom corrupts them to his own end."

He's talking around it, and Lily doesn't intend to let him. "And what do you think are his ends?"

Flamel shrugs easily, as if they are discussing the score to a Quiddich game. "Power for power's own sake. It is the only thing he has ever truly been seduced by, I believe. Lily, you are bored by my question?"

She tosses her head, defiant and keyed up and uncomfortable and ready to fight or flee or do anything than sit here across from this condescending ancient. "I am. You aren't offering anything new. I know why he's dangerous."

"You do not, and this ignorance dooms you and your mission to failure."

"Then _tell_ us," Sirius says, exasperated.

"Quite loyal, this one," Flamel says, flicking his eyes to Sirius for a moment. "Careful not to abuse that, my dear."

"My relationships have nothing to do with this war." Lily is tired of games, tired of being accused of things.

Flamel shakes his head. "You will find yourself mistaken in that, and at great cost, but very well. To the point I am attempting to make, though you may not hear it. Tom Riddle is lacks something we shall call a human heart." Flamel holds up an open, empty palm, as if weighing the emptiness. "It is an oversimplification but it serves my argument; he does not feel love or guilt or empathy the way you and I do.

"A creature without a heart would be a monster, surely, but with that lack alone he would be lonely one. No, Tom Riddle is dangerous because he lacks a human heart while possessing the rare talent of capturing the hearts of others. He can understand them, manipulate them, persuade them to tasks they would never dream of had he not entered their lives. No one is immune.

"And his ends, as I've said; he seeks control over them in order to obtain further control over other hearts and minds." He pauses, taking a sip of his drink, scanning their faces for reaction.  "It is an ouroburous, but power does breed power. All great wizards know this madness. Few have been so consumed by it as he. Fewer still have found such success."

"People say you're a great wizard," Lily says, accusing.

He tilts his head. "I have heard this."

"You made the Stone. Sought to defeat death itself." It comes too close to it, to their secret mission, but Lily has to press the issue.

"I did."

"How are you different, then? How are you any different than Tom Riddle?"

Remus' sharp intake of breath is one of horror, but she doesn't spare a look for him. If Flamel wants to take her down this little logic breadcrumb trail then he must be able to deal with the consequences, and she doesn't trust him.

Flamel sighs. "Because, Lily Potter, I have had other goals. I have a wife whom I love. I have friends like Albus Dumbledore who have taught me lessons. They have told me when I have erred and I have listened. I have seen the suffering before me in wars and I have chosen to act--not always as the generals would have had me act, but I have not been idle. In short, I have the sort of heart Tom Riddle lacks."

"Prove it," she spits.

He laughs. Nicolas Flamel, six hundred year old wizard and sole creator of the Philosopher's Stone, laughs in her face.

"Merlin, but Albus did say you were a spitfire. Oh, sit down, you silly girl, and take a breath. What would you have me do, expose the heart in my chest for your scrutiny?"

"It'd be a start," Sirius mutters.

"Oh, certainly. It would also prove little. I could mention that I have been entirely transparent in this little argument, that I have attempted to appeal to your logic instead of your baser instincts the way Tom Riddle would, but that has more to do with the inner workings of my own mind than any kindness. I could suggest I have answered all of your questions, countenanced your rudeness, and showed you hospitality, but you would find that meaningless. I could, perhaps, describe the scent of Amortentia to you, or I could produce a corporeal Patronus. But I think not." He raises one finger. "Faith, Lily Potter. I ask of you only for a few hours of faith in me, which you are welcome to sleep through. When the sun rises, I will give you what you seek, though you will find no joy in it."

"And what do you think we came for?" Lily asks.

Flamel's eyes flicker past Remus and Sirius before returning to her own. In passing over them, he seems to have made a decision, and become grave. "You seek the diadem of Rowena Ravenclaw, which you believe to be made into a horcrux by Tom Riddle. You seek to destroy it that you may someday destroy him. As if that could possibly be enough." He pauses. "I believe you know the destruction of Tom Riddle himself will never be enough."

The silence that follows is leaden. There's no lie that springs to Lily's mind, nothing she can do to shove the words back into his mouth.

"Is that true?" Remus leans forward, almost pleading, an agony of hope in his voice. "Is that what you're doing? Is that why you're here?"

Sirius ignores him, growling, "How do you know that?"

It comes to her with a terrible suddenness. Her mouth goes dry. It's a question she could have asked, _should_ have asked if she weren't so stupid. "Legillimency," Lily says, voice gone icy. "You don't know the first thing about it. You're plucking all of this straight from our minds."

"I confess it," Flamel says, smiling. "We have so little news here. Mostly I have borrowed from Sirius; you appear to be better trained in defense."

"Some might call that rude," Lily says.

"Some might call it equally rude to lie to your friends," Flamel retorts.

"I don't give a damn what you find to be rude," Sirius says.

"You each suspected the other of subterfuge before the death of your friend," Flamel continues calmly, nodding to Sirius and Remus in turn. "No one suspected the rat until too late. Tell me, Lily Potter, how did he die?"

This time she can feel the brush of his mind against hers, like breath on the back of her neck. In the horrible silence, she gives him nothing: the frozen tundra, winter at dawn, a waterfall of ice.

"Much better," Flamel says approvingly after long, tense seconds. "You may succeed yet. You have already done much better than anyone might have hoped, including Albus himself." The old man reaches his hand out to place the half-empty earthenware mug in midair, where it vanishes as if gone to sit on an invisible table. "I do have the information you seek, if you still desire it."

"Then tell us," Lily says flatly. She is through with this man, through with him changing the subject and hoodwinking them and moving along so quickly the moment she could have the upper hand. She doesn't want to trust him with her shoe size, let alone their mission. "No more games. Tell us now."

He rises to his feet and the chair disappears as he does, and Lily quickly stands as well before the cushion beneath her can dump her onto the earth. It very nearly unseats Sirius, but Remus is standing already, as if this has happened before. "As I have said, Lily Potter, you must wait until morning. A few hours of faith for an old man." His eyes shift. "Remus, if you could show them to the edge of our encampment, away from the others, and stay with them this evening?"

It's an order. These aren't refugees, or if they are, they are not only that. This is also an army, and Flamel is a general, and it's still entirely unclear whose side he is truly on besides his own. The nod Remus gives is unmistakable; she has seen him give the same to Albus Dumbledore herself.

"You may flee, if you feel you must," Flamel says, kindness in his face that does not quite reach his eyes. "But if you do, you will remain in ignorance."

Lily bites back any number of acidic retorts in favor of inevitability. "At dawn, then."

Flamel smiles. "At dawn. I will tell you everything I know."


	26. What Was Lost

Once the tent is set up--manually, as wands would attract questions from the werewolf populace, which is thoroughly excruciating--the darkness is absolute and Lily has been grinding her teeth for a solid hour. Remus follows herself and Sirius into the tent.

"If you want supper, you'll have to fend for yourself. I'm in no mood to play hostess," Lily mutters to Remus. To Sirius, she adds, "Tomorrow, don't meet his eyes. You leak like a garden hose."

Without waiting for response, she storms into the bedroom. She wants to slam a door but all there is is canvas partition, barely more than a curtain, and she tugs it violently across the opening instead, not bothering to charm it for privacy. If they want the comfort of a real bed instead of the armchairs out there, they will have to brave her company.

It is supremely childish that the only thing she wants, in her anger, is to talk to Severus. She could rage and storm and then he would come up with something thoroughly nasty and sneaky and perfect and she'd never do it, they'd come down on a much smarter and sneakier and less nasty sort of arrangement. But his imagination would satisfy her rage, the rage that even now has Sirius saying some string of profanity behind the curtain she closed.

She wraps a blanket around her shoulders and pulls out the tightly rolled scrap of parchment but can't think of what to write, what is safe to say over this wildly unsecured child's method of communication. What she even  _ can _ say of it yet; despite the length of the conversation with Nicolas she feels she has learned little yet that she can articulate clearly. 

In the kitchen, she can hear Remus say, "She hasn't sweetened with age."

Canvas isn't as soundproof as a door. They must assume she's thrown up a privacy spell, or that this door is just as secure those in houses. Or they don't care if she eavesdrops, which is the rudest of all.

"You've no idea. Never did understand what James saw in her but she's the only reason I'm here, so credit where it's due." A chair scrapes, and creaks under weight; Sirius is sitting down at the table.

The parchment rolls back up and is tucked up her sleeve as she shimmies closer to the slight gap between the canvas curtain and wall of the tent. Fine, if they don't care if she eavesdrops, then she'll eavesdrop.

"How did that happen, then? Snape took her from the home just before James was killed, last I heard."

"He did, the bastard. Obliviated her, though she says she told him to. Pulled James and Harry right out of her head with a memory charm."

"Harry." It sounds as if Remus' heart is breaking, for a moment. "I haven't thought of him in--I never even met him. I went off with to spy before he was born and didn't come back until…" He trails off, and they each give the death breathing room so it can dissipate into the stale air. "They're not pulled out of her head, you know. That's not how the charm works."

"Locked them away, then, does it matter?"

"There's a distinction. Pulled out is pulled out and potentially lost. Locked away can be unlocked."

Lily imagines she can hear the smile on Sirius' face. "I forgot that you're a bloody walking textbook."

"Can't fathom how you've managed without me for three years. How many toes have you lost to doxy bites?"

Sirius lets out a bark of laughter. "None. But I've got a red spot on the back of my neck where I put down a flea treatment, would you like to see?"

"You've been living as Padfoot, then?"

"Not as if I could have said  _ oh, sorry mum, I've reconsidered everything I've ever said to you and would like to come back into the fold. _ They'd have seen through it."

"Your mother was never terribly forgiving." He pauses, and his voice goes almost tender. "You could have come to find me, you know. Albus would have known how to find me, and could have proven your innocence."

There's a low snort. "Thing was, that would have come with strings, wouldn't it? Strings on Reg. Couldn't do that."

"Your brother, Regulus? Is he--?"

"What's this, then, an interrogation?" Sirius teases, but there is a bite to it, a real question underneath. "Think you can just wander across our path and think nothing's changed?"

"I never said that." Remus' tone is even, studied. "You just seem to have a very different opinion of your brother than the last time you spoke of him." That silence again, leaden, and another chair being dragged out and sat upon. Remus is at the table, then.

Sirius says, voice gruff, "Can I trust you?"

It comes clear, fast. "No."

Sirius curses.

Remus continues in earnest, as if he's heard it all. "I'll tell Nicolas everything you say without meaning to, and I will mean to. We have to trust him, here. I want to know the whole shape of what you're working toward but I can't. I don't know if Nicolas will work against you and I--all of the werewolves and I--are reliant on his help to keep this settlement secret and secure. I have to prioritize them. There's children, infected children, we can't risk-- It's safer not to say anything you can't afford an enemy knowing."

"Never took you for one so comfortable following orders."

"I do what I have to."

A breath of pause. "Are you really safe here?" Sirius asks. 

"Of course not. Nowhere is. Does Voldemort seem like he can be satiated in conquest, Sirius?" Remus asks wearily. 

"The Soviets seem to think so."

"After he took Hogwarts, the papers in Moscow said he would end there, that he must. When Durmstrang fell the next year, the papers in Paris were sure he's never touch Beauxbatons. Now the Salem Times is assuring everyone in the States that Ilvermorny is safe, the Beijing Institute has sent emissaries to London, and India and Italy have both closed their borders. Even that one-room schoolhouse teaching domestic charms in Sicily isn't taking anyone without an Italian passport these days."

"Thought you didn't have news," Sirius replies mutinously.

There's almost anger, somewhere deep inside Remus. "This happens to be the kind of news you tend to seek out when you might have to flee for your life at any moment."

"You could come back with us." There's a hazard greater than the lack of trust there, greater even than suspicion. "It could be like it was."

"You know I can't do that."

The silence stretches and beneath the blanket, Lily tenses, waiting for an intruder, for Sirius to storm into his bunk and leave Remus to sleep in an arm chair. But there's no sound of the chair scraping the floor, no movement. It seems Remus Lupin is a special case, allowed more lassitude with giving Sirius answers he might not like to hear. Lily wonders if James was like that, given more freedom to tell the truth--and if the rat was, too.

"I wish I could have been there for you. After James died," Remus says finally.

Sirius is so quiet that Lily has to strain to hear. "After all that I thought I'd never see you again. Never get a chance to tell you it wasn't me who betrayed them."

"I figured it out when I saw you with Lily. Or I figured Nicolas would. It's not as if I could take you on without a wand and it was worth waiting rather than knocking all your teeth out right away."

"That's not what I mean."

"I know. I'm sorry." A few breaths. "I couldn't believe it was you. Not ever. Not really."

A low, growling laugh--Sirius', in a tone she's never heard it before. It feels intimate, like a secret. "Come on, now, Moony, not even a few spite-filled months? A year of sweet gentle loathing?"

"Oh, perhaps. I did use a picture of you as target practice for a while, when I still had my wand, but the picture was just as good at dodging as you."

The sound that happens next takes a full fifteen seconds for Lily to understand, and when she does she feels her face go hot with embarrassment. Eavesdropping is not without its risks and one of those risks, apparently, is listening to Sirius Black kiss Remus Lupin. On the mouth, by the sound of it, and at length. They are going at it like they've had practice.

The silencing charm goes up quick as you please and Lily rolls over. God, but she had been oblivious. So wrapped up in her world, her war, let alone the colossal distraction of the black shadow of Severus hanging over them both, she missed this entirely. Did she know about this, once, or would this have been new to her back in 1981 as well?

And is that  _ jealousy _ that's started up a drumbeat in her abdomen? Not for Sirius--he's handsome enough but not her type in the least--but for the act, for unfettered snogging free of manipulation, for--

There were three years of peace with Severus. Three years built on a lie, surely, but there was peace: Christmas dinners and his steady hands when hers shook, and they shook often, as recently as this past holiday. He gave her morning glories twining their way up her bedpost and a distant, careful kindness that took only forgivable liberties; a kiss on the forehead, a hand on her arm, affection from a friend and caretaker. They are forgivable if she forgives them, at least, and if he wanted anything more--if  _ she-- _

There's nothing good that comes from continuing that thought, and even now she suspects that forgiveness is underserved. Lily stamps it out. The men out there in the sitting room, were they not otherwise engaged, they could smell the smoke of that thought a mile away. To them, she's still a bereaved wife, and it's likely half the reason they've put up with so much from her.

There is a very recent memory in Lily's mind.  _ You are angry because you're scared, _ she had said to Severus _. _ Water droplets fly off the tines of the fork.

Yes, she is angry. Yes, she is scared. Remus had been a shock, a new and old set of memory to get lost in or deny, neither option useful, both choices damning. And Flamel is another creature entirely: not Dumbledore, not Voldemort. Worse. Different. Older than both.

And she was terribly rude. Petunia would string her up by her thumbs if she knew. 

(If she were alive.)

Very well, then. Lily can keep it all and freeze it under and maintain a balance. She can keep to the fight. The parchment unrolls and the ink blooms without even thinking about it.

_ How did Peter Pettigrew die? _ Lily writes.

He makes her wait fifteen minutes to read  _ No. _ The N is overlarge, spiked, the o so narrow it was almost a line with no daylight in the center, and the period is so fierce it almost punctures the parchment.

_ I deserve to know _ , she writes back.

His handwriting is so fast it becomes sloppy.  _ He died while being tortured by myself and the Dark Lord _ .

_ That isn't enough. I want to know everything.  _ Lily chews the end of her biro, thinking, through long moments of silence.  _ There's something going on here I can't tell you, but for my own peace of mind, I want to know. _

Finally she writes,  _ Please. _

Severus' handwriting is ugly. A great many things about him are ugly if taken in the wrong light--the kind of light that Severus seemed to shift himself to stand in, if she's being completely honest with herself. But it's what she likes about him; he has no fiction for her, no false smiles, no kindness that a wooing schoolboy would try for. When they spar, he doesn't hold back. When they work together and she's wrong, he tells her so. When he smiles at her-- _ really _ smiles,  _ really _ laughs, not those put-on silken falsities and sneers and half-smiles he offers up to others--it's real, and it's hard-won, and it is  _ hers. _ And that's what she misses now, with Sirius treating her like a childhood friend one moment and a gossamer ghost fit to dissolve into thin air by the next turn. And Remus--well, who could ever read Remus but Sirius and James and Peter, but two of that number are dead and the last isn't particularly adept in translation.

By the end of the description of the long and messy end, some kind of dismay for the man she called  _ friend _ until he brought death to her doorstep. She tries to summon some kind of horror.

She can't.


	27. What Remains

"There is a reason we chose this place to hide," Flamel says. He's wrapped in a traveling cloak of a style Lily hasn't seen outside of portraits at Hogwarts. Fabric mounds around his shoulders and the huge heavy pin holding it shut is in the shape of a phoenix with a sword in its beak. "It is for the same reason you came to this place. Magic leaves traces, Dark magic most of all."

They are walking side by side through the woods, Sirius and Remus walking a distance ahead and conversing in their own quiet tones. The bright morning air and sparkling dew on the trees makes everything beautiful and new. It's hard to believe this is where the horcrux was made.

"Sirius has said he can sniff it out, so I assume that's what you mean. We didn't come completely unprepared," Lily says evenly.

"Of course. The locket, the diary, the cup, and the diadem. And one more that I do not know of. Do you have a plan to destroy them?"

Something jumps in her memory, something wrong, a scent the doe in her is frightened of, but it goes before she can grasp it. "There are ways we know of."

"That appears to be an answer in the negative," Flamel says.

She lets out the steam of exasperation through her nose before replying. "It isn't. We don't want to do it until we can be sure we have them all. If we try and he finds out, he can just make a rock into a horcrux and throw it into the sea and we'll never be rid of him."

Flamel laughs. "Not unwise. You will never be rid of men like Tom Riddle, but I must say disposing of this particular man seems increasingly urgent."

Lily snorts. "You sound like Dumbledore, but the more I hear you talk, the more I think you aren't like him at all."

"I merely seek the fundamentals of your plan that I may vet them and ensure they do not endanger us." Flamel cuts a glance toward her, and his eyes look bright and sharp in his ancient face. "Albus and I perhaps disagreed over a few finer points of how to fight this war. He, for example, believed it was possible to win a war without blood if one was merely clever enough. I do not. He also believed that self-denial and purity of spirit was a road to salvation and power. A silly and Christian notion if ever there was one. Albus was willing to sacrifice no end of his own people, even his own life, in order to land the correct stroke at the correct moment. I am not so particular. This is a war of attrition."

"And who have you sacrificed?"

"My wife," he answers readily.

Lily recoils. "Is she--"

"No, she is not dead, but she has consented to be part of this war perhaps more than I have. She lives in Paris for the moment."

"Occupied Paris."

"Indeed. I am capable of smuggling in the elixir of life to her, and she smuggles supplies and people to me, and Tom's minions harass our messengers if they grow too bold. A sample or two has been stolen of the elixir and been analyzed two years ago--possibly even by that Death Eater friend of yours--but the elixir betrays nothing of the stone that made it." Flamel reaches out, runs his fingers through a low-hanging branch of a pine. "Have you thought at all of what I told you yesterday? Of the nature of this war?"

Lily smothers the feeling that she's being condescended to and runs through the conversation of the day before, stripping away the color of anger from her recollection. "He lacks a heart. He manipulates the hearts of others." It sparks something. "You called them simple monsters, Fenrir and Macnair, but not the rest."

Flamel smiles as though he's a professor and she's just caught up to the rest of the class. "You understand, then, the nature of this war. His army is made up of people, people who have sought their heart's desires and found them in Tom Riddle's hands. The people who will have to die for this war to be won will be people who are loved by those around them, individuals who have known joy at the birth of their children and grief a the death of their parents and true, selfless love. They not be monsters to slay. And you will be forced to end their happy lives if you seek to even fight this war, let alone win it. You must be ready to bear that cost." He looks up, squinting in the sunlight. "I assure you it is not an easy burden and I beg you to begin preparing yourself for it now. Remus, this is the place."

They stop before a tree so vast and twisted it is impossible to see its top. Its base is so wide it dwarfs even the other trees around them. Even among the old oaks in this part of the forest it is massive, visibly ancient, its vast limbs shattering the light across the forest floor.

"Allow me a few minutes to prepare what you will see here. Remus, if you would assist me?" Flamel extracts a pouch from an inner pocket of his cloak.

Sirius backtracks toward her as they begin sprinkling the powder in a circle around the tree. It's sulfur and rosemary, by the smell, compounded with something that makes her want to sneeze like feathers. Still watching them, Sirius mutters, "What've you got out of him, then?"

"Has a wife in Paris," Lily replies under her breath. "Suggested she might be more interested in the war than he is."

"That could be something. Does she have a name?"

"Nothing yet, but Flamel's in so many books I'm sure Regulus could come up with it. But we don't have a way to communicate with him. Paris isn't nothing to go on, though. You?"

"Remus knows me too well to let much slip. The wards extend far enough that it picked us up as two wizards and Flamel sent Remus out to find out who we were and why we were there, but I can't imagine that's something Flamel wants to keep from us. Makes him look powerful." He scratches at the week of beard on his chin. "I'm rubbish at this. I'm used to people doing their dirty work in clear view while I'm pretending to be asleep on the rug. Doing it as a human is harder."

Lily nods, turning to follow Flamel and Remus as the circle closes and they disappear behind the tree. "Do you trust them?"

Sirius shrugs. "Dumbledore trusted Flamel. That's enough for me unless we see otherwise. He's giving us everything we ask for."

Lily turns fully to face SIrius. "And do you trust Remus?"

Sirius meets her eyes and there's a fierce loyalty in the way his jaw sets, his mouth a thin line of challenge. "With my life."

"If you're done conspiring," Flamel calls from the far side of the tree. "You will want to step out of the circle we have made. There are unpleasant side effects to being in the bounds of this particular spell."

"What side effects?" Lily shouts back, feeling her temper rising.

"Death," Flamel replies.

"Likely a very unpleasant death," Remus adds.

Sirius rolls his eyes before Lily can.

"Now," Flamel says once they join him just outside the circle. "Let me show you exactly what happened."

He draws something out of his robes. It takes a moment for Lily to realize it's a wand, but not like any wand she's ever seen before. It's distant from the polished wands she and Sirius have, in their crafted perfection, carved and smoothed into shapes not inherent in the wood itself. There are knots visible on Flamel's wand, and it's crooked in two places. There are marks from centuries of use on it, marks that his fingers unconsciously find in their grip. The tip is blunt, slanting to the side, as if it was hacked off a tree six hundred years ago and never shaped, merely worn down.

The incantation Flamel begins is long, melodic, and sounds nothing like the spells any of them learned in school. It sounds the way Lily imagined magic as a child: like the forest itself speaking through a man wielding in some ancient druidic dialect of German. His wand touches the circle of powder and it ignites, the flame speeding around the circle, streaking blue fire. It puts off such a stink and whooshing noise that it must be sulfur. But once the circle is complete, the fire appears to flood inward, toward the tree, burning nothing but wrapping it in blue flame.

"Watch," Flamel shouts over the roar of the fire. "This is precisely what occurred in this place, many years ago."

For a few seconds, there is nothing but the heat of the fire on their faces. And then beneath the flames on the branches, leaves unfurl in flame. Despite being the past, it's a vision of the future; the spring this place will go through soon enough. There are signs of it already on the branches, signs of budding. But the tree is slightly smaller in flame this way; a ghostly branch is sketched in the air where it is broken today. A bird made entirely of blue fire flits from one branch to another, nest-building twigs burning in its beak. If its chicks are tweeting, if its mate is calling, it can't be heard over the roar of the flames.

Before them, just beyond the edge of the circle, a man emerges. His features are handsome but twisted, even rendered this way; there is no color to him but the blue of the fire. The face is almost familiar, if she squints; it's not on a statue or a painting but she can recognize it, in a locked-away part of herself. He glances up at the tree and then behind him. If Lily didn't know better, she'd think he was looking right through her. Her vision goes gray at the edges, and a drumbeat begins, and something inside of her  _ pulls _ \--

Then he turns and it's gone, vanishing like smoke in the wind. The man who must be Tom Riddle advances on the tree. When he reaches the tallest root, he stands on it, looking up. With one more glance around himself, he leaps into the air and is propelled forward with a spell, upward, into the limbs of the tree.

It's Severus' trick from when they sparred, Lily realizes. This is who he learned it from.

Before the shock can set in he's scrambling--he's easily 10 years older than Lily, but at this distance and wreathed in blue fire he looks like nothing more than a little boy scaling a tree alone. There's even a half-second of fright for him when his fingers slip off a branch before he catches himself. Of all the things to feel for the man she intends to kill, this is the strangest.

He crests the tree, and his feet catch their landing on two uneven branches. There's a knot there before them, hollowed-out even now, and the fire burns brighter around it as he reaches his fist in and withdraws something that glitters even in the flame-borne memory, something bright and shining and so powerfully magical it hurts to look upon.

A movement across the field snags Lily's attention, and the wandering peasant girl moves into their line of sight. She can't be more than ten but she is confident in her movements, weaving a garland of spring flowers in her hands.

Tom Riddle spots her only just after Lily does. His mouth opens but there is no sound. She smiles back at him and speaks. He leaps from the tree and lands effortlessly, the diadem still shining like a sun in his fist. His expression doesn't change at all when he raises his wand and the bright, burning curse flicks towards the girl.

The fire is extinguished from outside of the ring inward, leaving nothing but her garland flung into the air and its contrail of blue flaming petals. It's like the sun has been doused. All Lily can see is the afterimage: a girl, smiling up at a handsome young man who only seeks to use her death to his own ends.

Sirius beats her to the cursing.

"Is that when he made it?" Lily asks when he's done, her voice shaking more than she means it to.

"It would seem so." Flamel turns toward them both, his face grave for once. 

"That wasn't enough," Sirius growls. "We need to know where it is now, not how he made it."

"Ah. That is where I come in. Or perhaps, to be specific, what I can relay from Albus Dumbledore." Flamel gives up a small and kind smile. "Albus confided in me before his death the date that Tom Riddle went for his interview for the Defense Against the Dark Arts position. It was, in fact, the very day of these events."

Lily's breath catches. She thinks she knows what he's saying but she has to be sure. "Say what you mean."

"Of course." Flamel draws himself up straight like a professor ready to offer the absolute final proof of his theory. "It is my belief that Tom Riddle took the diadem of Ravenclaw and hid it somewhere in Albus' own beloved Hogwarts."

"There's no way," Remus objects. "Dumbledore would have known. It could be anywhere between--"

"Such a thing would be sighted, detected." He turns to Sirius. "The horcruxes you have found, they have an abiding affect, do they not?"

"One of them was in a cave," Sirius argues. "It was hidden well enough."

"A remote location may serve, but it is still detectable. And there is his arrogance to contend with: that location is likely of particular import to the young Tom Riddle," says Flamel. "Or didn't you know that? You stumbled upon it by chance?"

The way Sirius' neck turns scarlet under the growth of his beard belies the truth of it. There's no need for Legilimency there.

"And the others," Flamel says, turning to Lily. "Where were they?"

"With loyal servants," Lily says. "Both of them."

"Even now, Hogwarts serves to train loyalists to his order in the vision of Salazar Slytherin. Would you not say the castle is of particular import to the young Tom Riddle?"

"I don't want to understand him," Sirius snaps. "I want to have done with him."

"Then it is your failure that awaits you, and on your head be it," Flamel says, turning to Remus. "If you would like to return to England with your friends to die in their war, I'm sure we could replace you." With a swish of his cloak, he strides over the ring of char surrounding the tree, back toward the hidden settlement.

Lily looks from Remus, who is thunderstruck, and Sirius who--worse--has a terrible kind of hope on his face. She's not a coward, but she has learned to pick her battles, and to pick ones she knows she has a chance of winning, and this is a fight she isn't even sure she has a stake in. She hurries after Flamel, whose long legs have already taken him halfway around the huge and ancient tree.

When she catches up to him, she's panting, and she can hear Sirius and Remus talking behind them both. She doesn't know what to say to Flamel--this all makes her head spin, makes her feel like a child back in school. "That was cruel," she pants.

"That was a reward," he answers, not slight of breath, not apologizing.

"For what?"

"Remus has been loyal, kind, respectful, and helpful." He doesn't have to look over to give the implicit addition:  _ unlike you. _

"You don't make it easy," Lily snaps, still catching her breath.

"I am utterly uninterested I am in  _ easy _ ." Flamel glances over his shoulder; Sirius and Remus are easily a hundred paces back, but following, engaged in heated and intimate conversation. "Forgive me if I am presuming, but the memory charm you bear could be broken quite easily if you would like to be whole once more."

Lily stops in her tracks, absorbing what he's said. Flamel stops with her, as if they are merely holding steady for a few moments listening the call of a rare bird, or watching the light falling through the trees. 

He goes on, voice low and careful. "Your friend is quite talented, but my skills surpass his. I'm quite sure it could be done safely."

Harry and James. Back. Entirely. All of it, not flashes, not moments. The child in her arms real and hers and connected back to the love she must have felt for him, no longer just a half-remembered weight. James real, loving her, and her loving him back--

"No," she says.

Flamel tilts his head, mildly surprised. "You would choose your friend over your husband? Your child?"

"I choose the war." She falters. "It took me years to recover from the spell's effects."

He looks, for the first time, frustrated. "As I have said, it would be safe. You would be as you were."

And isn't that just the issue. "I wasn't-- I couldn't fight, like that. I was nothing, remembering them."

"You are nothing now. You were a wife, then, a mother, loving and beloved." 

Lily snorts, folding her arms. "That's retrograde."

"We are not meant to live without our own memories."

She can't help the anger flaring. "I've managed it, thanks." 

"You are not so well trained in Occlumency that I did not see the face that caused your refusal." A strange look, both frustrated and terribly sad, passes across his face. "You will have to tell him about it some day."

Lily reaches deep and pulls out a sneer Severus would be proud of. "And how do you make that feel like an accusation?"

"It is not. It is merely a fact. You will have to tell that dear Death Eater friend of yours what you chose today, once you abandon this opportunity, because I do not think you will be back in my company again. You will have to tell him that you refused." Flamel's mouth moves into something not entirely unlike a smile, something not entirely unkind. "And you will have to tell him why."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you believe you have noticed an internal inconsistency here, consider that it might not be an inconsistency at all.


	28. Faith

The next morning, Lily wakes two hours before Sirius and makes a few secretive preparations based on a number of decent half-guesses and suspicions. 

When Sirius wakes, she's done and breakfast is ready. The tent comes down before the sun is fully up.

"Will Remus be joining us?" Lily asks as the last of the tent packs itself away.

Sirius' mouth goes flat and sour. "No," he says, and that's the end of it. Maybe it's cowardice or maybe it's prudence, but she lets it alone. It doesn't matter, anyway; back in the encampment, in an hour, Remus will find a particularly trusting songbird compelled to lead him to a parcel left under a fallen branch: two sheets of parchment and a snuffbox full of Floo powder that Severus had thrust into her hands before she left. One sheet explains the other, and she has the twin to the second wrapped tight in her bag.

If either of them  _ honestly _ thought she'd consent to depart without some way to communicate and some way to transport each other, they're both mad, but she wasn't about to give either of them an opportunity to sabotage her. Remus is, unlike Sirius, smart enough to hold onto a thing like that on the off chance it might come in useful. Sirius would just send the whole lot up in smoke if he were angry. Best not to give him the opportunity.

The journey back is easy enough. They take a different route along the coast, wear different faces, wind along the edge of Italy and then through Austria. They spend three whole days pretending to be an elderly man and his daughter in Zurich to shake a potential tail that turned out to be a very persistent Muggle group of pickpockets who, once sussed, was susceptible to being Confunded.

The map is rolled out on the table--they are encamped in another forest just over the border--and Sirius is checking distances to towns when Lily puts one finger down on Paris.

"We're so close," Lily says. "We could try to find Flamel's wife."

"With what? We don't even have a name."

"We could go to a library."

Sirius groans. "I thought I'd never hear that sentence again after we graduated, Lily."

"We're close to Beauxbatons, their library would have much of the same--"

Sirius' expression grows dark. "Hearing them crow about they did do that place was more than enough."

Lily doesn't want to see it any more than he does. "I hate coming back empty-handed."

"Not empty-handed. We know it's at Hogwarts."

Lily snorts. "We know Flamel  _ thinks _ it's at Hogwarts."

"Albus did, too."

"Based on timing alone. I don't know." Lily shakes her head. "Still feels empty-handed to me."

Sirius cocks his head. "If I didn't know better, I'd say you didn't want to go back."

Flamel's calm, sure tone echoes in her mind:  _ you'll have to tell him. _ No, she bloody well doesn't have to tell anyone anything, and she isn't even sure what there is to tell. She waves the thought away with a hand. "I'm just frustrated. And the pastry on that last train was rubbish."

The miles of France pass beneath them without detour, and before she knows it she is Disillusioned on the doorstep of the familiar house in Cokeworth. The door opens to her touch; the wards must still be keyed.

She doesn't know why she expected Severus to greet her there in the entry hall, but she did. The last she had written to him was  _ I expect I'll see you tomorrow, _ and she had got back nothing at all. Lily wanders the halls, calling his name, until she reaches her own room--the bare cell from the hallway, blooming into beauty when she steps over the threshold, and the construct laying there quietly in the bed.

"Hello," Lily says to the eerie familiar face. "Do you know where Severus is?"

It opens and closes its mouth a few times, caressing the air in front of its face. "Away," it finally says.

"Where?" Lily presses.

"Gone," the construct croaks. "Lonely."

"I don't care how you feel. Where is  _ he?" _

"Lonely," it says again.

"You're useless," Lily grumbles.

"Not entirely," a familiar voice says behind her, amused.

Lily whirls, and there's a smile on her face she can't quite exactly help because her heart is leaping into her throat, and she throws her arms around his neck. Into the shoulder of his shirt--a  _ shirt, _ where the hell has he been keeping a muggle knit thermal shirt--she starts her tirade: "You have no idea, Severus, I hate  _ everything: _ I hate camping, I hate the woods, I hate Albania, I am pretty sure I hate Sirius at least a little bit, and I definitely hate Nicolas Flamel."

There's something happening in his chest underneath her cheek--his shoulders are shaking and it's because he's  _ laughing. _ He's trying to hold it back but he's laughing and it's ridiculous, and she can feel the warmth of his skin beneath the shirt which is producing an entirely different kind of heat inside of her body, and as she pulls her head up she wonders if she could kiss him right now and not be trying to get anything but a kiss out of him.

Stamp  _ that _ out. Damn it all, stamp it  _ out. _

\--She doesn't. She wants to. Not because she needs something, not because she is helpless, not because the power between them is seesawing away from her, but because she  _ wants to _ .

In direct defiance of all good sense, she goes up onto her tiptoes and presses her lips to his.

It's not a burning or cursed thing, this kiss, not like the others where she has used them as a tool to prise something forth from him. His mouth shifts beneath hers and it is sweet and gentle and so sudden there is no room for despair or desperation or the claustrophobia of their shared life to intrude. His hand moves to the center of her back and presses her close, and hers is on the back of his neck, and when they break apart it's natural and easy and mostly due to the fact that the construct behind them is making some sort of very irritating noise. Lily had forgotten it was there.

(Something mutinous inside of her says it's not the only thing she's forgotten.  _ That _ she locks under ice.)

Lily pulls away to look over her shoulder and the construct has both of its hands over its face. The high-pitched keening continues.

"How has  _ that _ thing been?"

When she looks back at him, he's almost serious again, the astonishment and the laughter both erased. There's only a slight flush crawling up his throat to give it away. "Serviceable. It has only been glimpsed on two occasions by messengers taking my work to the war effort. Beyond that, I haven't had the need."

No asking after the kiss, then, which is interesting. It says this could be normal, this could be who they are to each other, which is a chasm Lily can't afford to fall into right now. But her hand is still draped around his neck, his hand a gentle pressure on her back through her cloak, and neither of them move. "No one of importance?"

"We're a distance from most relevant places. No reason to come if an owl will do."

"So you're getting owls. You'll have to tell me what you're working on." Lily turns, pulling her hand down to his chest, not wanting to break the contact. "That sound the thing is making is awful. Come on, I'll put on tea. There's a lot I couldn't tell you through the note. Have we got anything to eat?"

"Not really."

She pulls away, finally, moving to the door. "Let me guess. You've subsisted on beans on toast for the past two weeks. How can you be so brilliant at potions and so rubbish at cooking?"

He scowls, mostly for show. "Potions are useful."

"Failing to contract scurvy is also useful, you ninny."

The story in its entirety takes one full pot of tea. She leaves out only a few things: first, Sirius and Remus being more than friends isn't hers to tell, even if pureblood attitudes on homosexuality were at least more relaxed--if not also more complicated--than Muggle ones. Second, she keeps the specific location of the werewolf settlement secret. He doesn't need to know, and it's a sign of trust to give back to Remus and Flamel if need be. But everything else--Flamel and his mind-games, Remus and the balance of his suspicion and his trust, the flames and their memory of young Tom Riddle, the diadem and its suspected location--she gives it all up.

"Hogwarts," Severus muses across the table, tracing his lower lip with a fingertip. Even dressed so casually he can look intimidating. "It will be a challenge to go there. Its wardings were always quite strong, even when it was under Dumbledore's protection. They have not lessened for the Dark Lord."

"Could we go openly?"

He inclines his head. "I could make an excuse."

There's something wrong with that sentence, something wrong with his tone--something reckless she hasn't seen before. "Something that doesn't blow your cover, I mean."

"Perhaps." Which sounds like  _ I don't care. _

"Severus, are you--safe?" Lily asks. Her voice goes up in pitch with nerves and she clears her throat to bring it back to steadiness. "Your status in the Death Eaters, I mean. What Sirius said makes me nervous. I don't want to endanger you."

He looks away, across to the stove where the kettle has just started whistling again. He stands and she watches him move, watches the practiced ease, the carelessness of his limbs. It's as if a great weight has been lifted off him. It's almost like he's  _ happy. _ Which is more sad than strange, really. The old shirt--a heathered dark gray, with sagging cuffs he has to keep pulling back from his wrists, soft from washing and wear--is stretched at the neck and reveals half a collarbone, half of the line of his shoulder, and his lank and long hair licks at the skin exposed when he tucks it back behind his ear. There's something disturbing, something wrong, there, the shirt: it's ancient, the way it's worn, the hem is threadbare and when he reaches up for more tea from the cabinet it rides up over his hip to expose a slice of skin--

Stop stop  _ stop. _ This kind of distraction is idiotic and bizarre and no one has ever swooned over  _ Severus. _ For a mad half-second she wonders if he's dosed her with a love potion--a vile gambit, beneath him, but not totally out of the question, neither of them are terribly trusting people--but she is an experienced potioneer and would have tasted it, would have smelled it, and they poured from the same teapot.

Not as if he needed to be fed a love potion, though.

Lily sniffs the dregs of her tea while his back is turned: nothing but tea, as far as she can tell, and three cubes of sugar. She swirls it and says, "Privately, Flamel told me he could break the memory charm." The rest of the tea goes down like a shot of liquor, and to hell with suspicion.

He freezes for half a second, then goes on, a weight settling back onto his shoulders as he scoops tea into the pot to steep. "And."

Her finger traces the rim of her empty cup. "I told him no."

"Why would you do that?" he asks. His voice isn't the sharp, teacher's tone he's used to discuss the rest; it's low and intimate. If her ear were pressed to his shoulder she'd feel it more than hear it.

"I don't know. He told me I'd have to tell you someday, but that sounded like nonsense to me." Out the window, spring is blossoming, a riot of flowerbuds. Counting them is better than watching Severus move and wondering--anything, really. "Why, do you think you know?"

The teapot comes back to the table to steep and he sinks back into the chair across from her. "I have my suspicions."

She plucks sugar cubes out of the bowl with her fingers, letting them fall with a tiny porcelain sound into the cup. "Tell me what you suspect of me, then."

He pours for both of them and leans on one arm, the other swirling his tea in the cup. "Not until I am sure. It would only upset you."

She bristles. "You're upsetting me  _ now _ ."

He looks away, tugging at the cuffs again, pulling them away from his slender wrists and the delicate bones and the tendons that stand out there, and the blue veins, and--

She snatches his left wrist in a vicegrip and pulls the sleeve up, all the way to the elbow.

There's nothing there. The Dark Mark is gone. Which means--

"Who the are you?" she whispers.

"I can explain--" he starts, but she comes to her feet fast, slamming the imposter's wrist down on the table with her left hand and and with the right draws her wand to dig it into his jugular. 

The face is too familiar, the cry of pain hurts her, and she  _ hates _ it. "Where's Severus?" she snarls.

The dark eyes search hers the same way his might. The mouth twists to bare his teeth, biting back a retort even with his arm twisted and pinned beneath her grasp. It looks so much like him she wants to retreat, wants to give him the benefit of the doubt, but the emptiness on his forearm doesn't lie.

"I'm Severus," he says, swallowing heavily. The point of her wand bobs with the movement. "It's not what you think."

"Liar," she snaps. "Is it polyjuice? Transfiguration? What have you done with him?"

That sets his lip twisting in condemnation. He's shutting her out, the same way Severus does and it makes her want to weep with frustration. "Why don't you figure it out?" he sneers.

She's out of patience. Worse, she's scared. He's exactly,  _ exactly _ like him, all his snide confidence, all his cleverness, all his stubbornness, and he never could make anything easy even if he was telling the whole truth, which happened mostly never.

"I'm done playing games," she hisses, and the wand flicks away from his throat to cast the spell wordlessly, binding him in rope. He struggles, opens his mouth to speak, but a knot of rope lodges between his teeth before it comes out. She snaps out another spell to put him to sleep, too, for good measure, same as the doe in the cellar.

Lily stands there, panting with frustration, before scrubbing her hand across her face and cursing at the light fixture feet above her. "This is bad," she mutters to the frosted glass. It doesn't have any answers.

Lily wonders, briefly, about a life where all of this is a bad dream. A life where magic is a fiction for little girls, where the Dark Lord is a story to keep little boys frightened of the dark and chivvy them in the house by dusk. A life where she and Severus had usual school dramas over math and chemistry and then went to university and--

_ (And what, Evans?-- _ )

A whimper at the door of the kitchen, and Lily's gaze and wand come back from the half-fantasy before she can really register it fully. But it's nothing dangerous, just the creature--the mirror, the beast with her face, looking down at the bound and unconscious imposter.

"So," Lily says, stretching her neck to one side and then the other in a failing effort to relieve tension. "How long has  _ he _ been here, pretending?"

It shakes its head, looking nervous. It keeps picking up its feet and placing them back down, as if pawing at some forest floor that isn't there.

"That's what you meant by  _ away _ , isn't it? So where is the real Severus?"

"Gone," it whispers.

"If he's dead, I'll kill you out of sheer spite," Lily says.

It shakes its head. "Not dead. Not--" she gestures with both hands.

It takes a moment for Lily to parse the movement, but when she is, she swears aloud. It's a pantomime: a wedding ring on a finger. Of course, what little the pet has, it would have free of the encumbrance of the memory charm. It doesn't bear inspection, how an animal might take on human grief. "Don't test me. If you don't have answers, I'll throw both of you in the cellar."

It sets its jaw. "Gone," it says insistently.

"Gone  _ where?" _

"Gone!" it cries, hands fisting with what it can't convey. "Gone, gone, gone,  _ lonely!" _

There's a sudden sickening sense that the thing isn't just talking about Severus. It's making excuses for what it saw, for that idiot kiss, for whatever foolish and childish part of her spurred her on to  _ that _ sterling impulse _. _

"Get out," Lily snarls. "Get  _ out! _ I'll find him myself."

It flees. She doesn't care where to.

The body of the imposter goes in the cellar next to the doe. She searches him for a wand but finds none; it's odd and it makes her worry so much she wants to wake him and ask about it, but instead she makes sure the ropes are snug and takes a few breaths to expel the feeling.  _ Finite _ over his face reveals nothing new of Severus-not-Severus, whose eyes are closed in sleep, looking peaceful, vulnerable, lips parted and  _ dammit Evans stop getting distracted. _

Lily has had many minor talents held over from being a member of the Order of the Phoenix, many of them discovered in deeply horrible circumstances. She can remember it all, at this point, except the man would would have been at her side during it. But she has searched half-destroyed homes for survivors, looked through crime scenes for clues Aurors may have missed. She's had the slapdash secondhand Auror training Moody and Alice tried to run, and she has a leg up: she knows this house. She can infer all sorts of things that an outsider might miss. So: she begins with the cellar.

The doe is still there, still asleep, which means Severus is alive. The idea that he might be dead had gripped her heart, building a cairn of tension on her shoulders, and now it comes tumbling off her stone by wretched stone. It lets her look at the rest of the cellar more clinically. Bringing the imposter down obliterated any footprints that might be there, more's the pity. If it's Polyjuice the imposter is using, she will have to wait for it to revert; a timekeeping spell will sound the alarm once an hour for her to check on the thing, but if it's Polyjuice from Severus' own reserves then it will likely last the full 12 hours.

Up the stairs, the entry hall looks as it always does: empty, echoing, marble floors clean. No tracked grime or telltale shoeprints, and the walls are so pristinely white that any blood or mark would show. The stairs that sweep off to the left and right to meet above the French doors that lead to the dining room are hardwood and are equally polished. The coat closet has a few older cloaks in it, but Severus' current traveling cloak is missing. So he's alive, and he took his cloak--which suggests he left willingly, and likely with his wand, which explains the lack on the imposter. Not having  _ any _ wand on him seems insane, but who knows what his goals are. He hadn't seem surprised by her arrival, her having a wand, by any of it, which is another clue that doesn't fit with anything yet.

Through to the dining room, Lily paws through the hearth. The fire is out and the hearth is clean of soot with a wood laid for a fresh fire; they must not be expecting anyone today but may soon. Floo is far too tracable anyway, there's a reason they only use it for activity they can excuse as official; the hearth being dark doesn't say as much as it might.

The kitchen is a mess of signs of her struggle with the imposter and little else, and as she searches she sets it to right as well; the overturned chair righted, the mugs and teapot cleaned and put away, the teaspoons polished. The store of sugar cubes is a bit less than it was when she left, but that could easily be the construct version of herself taking her tea the way Lily herself does. Or eating them like a horse, she supposes.

At the top of the stairs, the laboratory has clearly been used. There are ingredients in various stages of preparation; an apprentice's kind of work, one even a child or a squib could do to assist a potioneer. Maybe the construct is helping. The cupboard where the ingredients are stored has been restocked since she left, and in the stocking cupboard next to it, blood-replentisher is low. Lower than she left it, at least. It's worrying, but maybe that was part of Severus' plan to repair any damage to the construct; she didn't catch his methodology. Or it might be something more sinister. Maybe he's been hurt. Maybe he's being kept alive, somewhere.

The blue bedroom Bellatrix stayed in is exactly the state Lily left it in, and there's a thin layer of dust. The library across the hall has been dusted, and a few volumes might be switched round--she swore she put that growling book about constructs back closer to the edge of the case--but it's not enough to go on. The Potion-Master's Compendium is precisely where they left it, and the horcruxes are still there, intact.

Upstairs from that, the construct is huddled in her cell, ripping petals off a flower next to a small stack of stems. Nothing changed there; being unable to read must be terribly dull. Lily shuts the door on it.

Severus' room, the grand master suite that it is, is as spare as it ever has been. The covers are rumpled, which isn't surprising--he's never been a tidy sort--but something's off. They're rumpled on the wrong side, she realizes. When she slept here-- _fell_ _asleep here,_ which was an _accident--_ it was the side she had slept on. She taps her wand against her lower lip, thinking.

" _ Hominem revelio," _ she whispers. Her sense of the house expands with the spell; it doesn't reveal the construct in her cell, which is interesting, and--there's someone in the entryway and no one in the basement.

It is not quite exactly possible to fly without a spell or a tool of some kind, but Lily very nearly manages it, half-sprinting, half-falling down two flights of stairs and galloping out to the top of the banister above the entryway. He must have got free somehow, she's an idiot,  _ how-- _

There's an unfamiliar figure standing in the doorway, and for a moment she wants to crow with triumph, but it can't be the imposter; this person looks tired and wet from outside and has been caught in the act of pulling off Severus' cloak. Her wand is in her hand and his is pointing straight back half a breath later. From a distance it's impossible to tell if it's Severus' wand, but it  _ is _ ebony. There's a fist in her throat and she wants to fight.

The man's voice is gruff from beneath a gray beard and a jaw like an anvil. "Lily?"

"What have you done with Severus?" she says. Her voice quavers and in a flare of anger at herself as much as him, she flings a hex at his feet. He jumps back nimbly enough and doesn't shoot anything back.

"Lily, stop," he says again, with more force this time.

Lily ignores him, vaulting over the banister and using a cushioning charm to let her land lightly on the marble floor. "Who are you?"

"I met you on a playground," he says, both hands in the air. "You flew."

Something funny happens in her gut, and it makes her falter in her march towards him. " _ Severus? _ "

That smirk is unmistakable, even beneath the gray beard, even on a stranger's face.

She lowers her wand. "I could still be someone else. You should come up with something to ask me."

He tilts his head, considering, as he hangs his cloak, removing the charm used to enlarge the shoulders to accommodate the bulkier body. "If your trip was successful, what book would I take down first?"

She smiles. "The Potion Master's Companion. Volume Five." She shakes her head. "But I wasn't, I've only brought back information, which I have to explain  _ again _ because someone is pretending to be you when I explained it the first time. Do we need to kill him?"

He raises an eyebrow. "Only if you'd like to dispose of a large amount of work and blood that came out of the cauldron several days ago."

_ Oh. _

Lily lets out a protracted string of vulgarities; it's been staring her in the face the whole time, literally following her around the house, and of  _ course _ if he made it with his own blood it would be him, exactly him, without any enchantments--which includes the Dark Mark. "I assumed-- well, it doesn't matter now. He's tied up in the basement because your paranoia is rubbing off on me. When does that face wear off?"

His lips quirk in what could almost be considered a smile. "An hour."

"Good, because I much prefer your face on your head instead of plastered across some misbegotten experiment." She sighs, pinching her brow. "I'll tell you everything I told him over again, then we'll wake it up and start plotting. I think I know what our next move has to be and you're not going to like it."

"There was no chance of that," he says, a ghost of his usual biting tone nested inside of the stranger's voice.

"There wasn't," she agrees, turning to lead him into the sitting room. "You know, it was the strangest thing. You want to know how I found him out?"

He follows, boots ringing against marble. It's heavier than his usual stride, all wrong, but listening to the swish of his robes and the sound of those footfalls is almost comforting, knowing it's really him. "How?"

  
She glances over her shoulder--not to the borrowed face, but to the hands, steady, swinging at his sides, to the left forearm where the mark lies under his sleeve. "He seemed  _ happy. _ "

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've had a version of this house in my head for quite some time but this is the first time I've really had to map it out as Lily searches. If I were a better writer and researcher, I would have found a floor plan to some lovely English mansion in the midlands and used that, or had a house design in mind when I began, but now it's too late, I've said the guest room Bellatrix stayed in is on the same floor as the Library and the Laboratory and I'm stuck with it. I'm not even sure what I've drawn up is technically a mansion. So it's a three-story house and I'm not an architect. It's a garbage hodgepodge mess from no era at all with pretty stairs and a crooked chimney to put all the hearths where they need to be.


	29. Another

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The joke title of this chapter is "TOO MANY SNAPES" and I can't tell if this entire plot point is dumb or not because i'm not done writing this whole plot arc but it is too late, dear reader, you cannot save me from myself.

The constructed Severus comes to sitting at the table, looking into the face of the genuine article. They eye each other with clear distaste. 

Well, that answers  _ that _ question. Of course they would hate each other.

"I figured it out," she says snidely over Severus' shoulder from her seat at the table.

"All on your own, I take it," the construct replies, condescension dripping from every syllable.

Lily scowls. "The other one is at least tolerable, even if it's a little dim.  _ This  _ one has an ego."

"The same as his," the thing says archly, jutting his chin toward Severus.

"Pity it still has a use," Severus muses, straightening from where he has been bent over the thing and moving to his seat.

"Which, the ego or the construct?" Lily asks.

Severus only raises an eyebrow.

Fair enough. She turns back to the thing. "Severus told me I'm not allowed to turn you into soup, if that's any comfort."

It grits its ugly teeth. "A decidedly cold comfort."

Lily smiles. "Clever boy." Because of course it can only mean one thing: that it has a use too dangerous to send the real Severus in for. "I've caught the real Severus up to speed, so we've brought you 'round to plot with us. Two and a half brains being better than two." She sounds confident, but her arms are crossed, legs crossed, and one toe won't stop jiggling to some manic beat.

"Infiltrating Hogwarts, then," it says grimly.

"She seems to think she's going with you," Severus adds.

The expression on the thing's face changes to mirror Severus' own: mouth downturned into a frown, eyebrows up,  _ absolutely not _ writ clear across both faces _. _

"And what, we send the half-deer upstairs in with this one? That one won't work, and the other one--the one that was  _ me _ enough--would probably try to set fire to a broomstick with your nose. They'll be blown in seconds, and it's not as if either is anonymous." Lily sets her shoulders. "It has to be me. You need someone who can do magic and  _ this, _ " she gestures to the construct with a flick of her fingertips, "can't."

"The dog," the construct says, which is also exactly what Severus said.

"Would sooner eat glass than work with any version of you, and you know it," Lily retorts. "Besides, do you want him to know you made this thing? He'll suss whatever it is you're up to, and then he'll probably throw it in the bin for spite. And we're going to come back round to the fact that both of you seem  _ excessively _ willing to sacrifice Sirius' life."

"As a dog, you mean? That's not a life," the construct says.

"And neither is mine, but you seem to value it rather more," Lily says acidly to the thing wearing Severus' face. "Funny enough, I don't value  _ yours _ at all, which is why you get to come with. I find you entirely disposable."

His expression flattens in a perfect imitation of the dismissive, cold expression Severus uses for people he finds tiresome. "You've made that quite clear."

It's less satisfying than it might be to throw barbs at the thing. She did share that sliver of misplaced intimacy with it. Severus hasn't been informed of that particular detail, but it could inform him, and that is a weapon she gave away. 

But it doesn't use it yet. It merely looks at her as if he'd like to scrape her off its boot.

The three of them bandy ideas back and forth like a quaffle, but the best one rises to the top; they can plumb Lucius and the other Governors, perhaps, but the actual theft cannot occur openly while Severus is there, which means it's sneaking or nothing. The castle is vast, deeply magical, perhaps inimical to their goals; the search could take weeks, and there are a vanishingly small number of ways to shorten that time.

Severus is in the middle of a sentence when it happens, pacing behind his chair. "Perhaps the house-elves could be convinced to assist our search, but the story we would tell them would have to be utterly innocuous should it reach the ears of--"

Then he hisses and grasps his left forearm, fingers wrapping tight around it.

Lily's on her feet so fast the chair tips over backward, falling to the floor with a crash. She's sure it's happened before, in this house, even in front of her once or twice, but not since they started this war, not since she dragged him into it. Fear is iced rimed about her heart.

She doesn't mean for the words to come out a desperate whisper, but they do: "You don't have to go." 

A crooked sort of expression, a sort of pained almost-smile paints his bloodless face. "You know I must." Before she can object, his wand points to the door, summoning his cloak, and then flicks it at the fireplace to kindle flames in the wood laid there. Lily is trying desperately to marshal her thoughts, to form a plan where he doesn't have to go, not like this, not mid-treason, but as the cloak swirls around his shoulders he throws a handful of Floo and says a place that is swallowed by the roaring in her ears, and he's stepped in without so much as saying goodbye.

The absence is a rung bell. The construct has moved behind her, righting the chair; the scraping of the legs behind her almost makes her jump.

Its voice is low as it lays a hand on her shoulder. "Are you all right?"

"Don't," she snaps, shrugging her shoulder out from underneath him and spinning round to face him. She's so keyed up and terrified she could strike the thing across its face for touching her. 

And it seems to know she could strike it. "The Dark Lord does call occasionally at random to keep his followers on their toes. This is likely nothing."

"It feels like something." She rubs at the ache starting in her temples. "All right. All right. You're a bellweather, at least, if anything--if he--"

"If he dies," the construct finishes for her.

"Don't say that." Her heart seizes like a fluttering bird and she wraps it in ice faster than its wings can beat again. "Why do you think he was called?"

"The Dark Lord is capricious. There are any number of reasons."

She wants to punch a wall. "Best guess."

"I've told you, there's nothing. There's nothing the Dark Lord expects but potions for the war front, the same I've--" it catches itself, gives its head a small shake, "--he has been making for over a year."

"There's no reason, then. No reason at all, unless--"

"Don't."

"What am I supposed to do, then?" she cries, slamming a tight fist into the top of the chair. "I can't just sit here and talk to  _ you. _ You're not Severus."

His eyes glitter strangely. "You might be surprised."

And isn't  _ that _ the invitation of the year. As if she'd clear her busy social calendar ( _ ha _ ) for--for--

A secret. Kept.

No, it isn't an invitation; that would be disgusting in the extreme. It's much more sinister than that. It's a promise. It comes into horrible focus that it  _ knows _ something, something much bigger that the real Severus doesn't know or can't see, something that Lily barely is willing to know for herself, and she wishes the floor would swallow her up.

She can't bring herself to say it, though. She sits down and puts her forehead, miserably, onto her crossed arms and shuts her eyes. "What are you going to tell him?"

By the sound of his footfalls and the sound of the chair, he's gone back across from her, reestablished a distance. It would be comforting if she weren't at the thing's mercy. "I will tell him nothing."

"Good. Because I'll turn you into soup if you do, no matter who you look like."

Seconds tick past, and then: "This is the issue with constructs," the thing says finally. "Particularly human-formed constructs, ones of intelligence."

"Explain."

"What you did to the precise construct of yourself is highly unusual. Most do not have the stomach to dissolve something with their own face and mind. It suggests certain...  _ dangers _ in your character."

Her head rolls back and forth against her forearms as she shakes it. "You think I'm going insane."

"No." The thing looks pensive, the same way Severus does when they debate the finer points of magic. "There is an argument to be made that your reaction is the wiser of the two, rather than allowing it to form its own thoughts, opinions, entanglements. They are capable of becoming confused. There are several historical cases of a construct attempting to destroy or imprison and replace their masters."

She isn't going to play along with it, this revealing-all, the kindness and open-handed information. Cracking open one eye and craning her neck to peer at him, she says, "And is that in your plan?"

It fixes her with a withering look. "Obviously not. It is very clear that none of this is about  _ me _ ."

Which is worse. And might suggest a  _ danger in the character _ of Severus, if she thinks about it, which she doesn't want to. Lily has been chewing on the inside of her lip but she forces herself to stop as she tastes the faintest hint of blood. The thing sitting across the table from her isn't stupid or homicidal. It truly is exactly like Severus, just without magic, without the Dark Mark, and with vanishingly little to lose. Which is to say, without all the things that made Severus who he is. Which is to say, entirely unlike him. But it's capable of  _ seeing _ things even she and Severus--

Actually, there is something this thing could help her with, come to think of it. "Where has Severus been going? We debriefed but he came back with a stranger's face. I asked in a couple different ways but he saw straight through it and wouldn't tell me what he's up to, which is bloody  _ splendid _ . He didn't give up anything, not even when I got very cross about the fact that he's using the Potter Estate for whatever the hell it is. He's shut like a clam."

"Naturally. But he hasn't shared his work with me. It would be a liability." His hand moves toward her, long enough to be clear, not far enough to touch. "Obviously."

The table is big and old and very beautiful, and when her forehead connects with it it makes an almost musical  _ thunk. _ "Why am I not surprised. I'm just as useless as you. Might as well go upstairs and eat violets."

And then that soft little  _ laugh _ comes again and she wishes with an almost physical pain that she could hear Severus--the real Severus--laugh like that, like it's something joyful that's escaped the iron trap he's fashioned himself into. Like they are best friends and she's said something funny and he hasn't learned to Occlude so hard that sometimes she doesn't even recognize him.

"Do you think he knows," she says, trying to sound genial and failing utterly, "that if he dies I'm going to go completely spare?"

It's voice is careful, but not cold. "I haven't the faintest."

They sit there like that, woman and the shadow of a man who might have been, in silence punctuated by the crackle of the hearth until Lily has finally managed to unclench her jaw and calm her breathing. And it can hear her do it, can hear the panic she hadn't planned for, hadn't even  _ considered _ , which is the worst kind of tell, but it doesn't say anything about it--a small mercy. Once she's under control it says something about the plan for infiltrating Hogwarts, and she pulls her head off her arms to poke holes in the idea. It knows as much about Hogwarts as anyone who has worked there for two years but the information is three years and one major regime change out of date. If she doesn't think about it too much it is very close to what planning with Severus is like anyway, so they might as well work and wait for bad news. It is, at the end, very much like him: brutally efficient, uninterested in kindness, and completely at her mercy.

When the fire burns green again, they are both hunched over a hastily sketched map of the grounds of Hogwarts. Lily's wand is out and pointed before the dark head emerges.

"What's my favorite holiday?"

Severus steps out of the hearth, brushing soot until he notices her wand. "What?"

"There are too many people who look like you in this room already and I don't trust your master. What's my favorite holiday? When we were kids, I mean."

Recognition blooms, and he scowls at it. "My birthday. Because you got to embarrass me and I couldn't do anything about it."

"That's not how I'd describe it," she says, though it is. She lowers her wand. "What did  _ he _ want?"

He doesn't look at her. Rather, he looks to the construct. "Leave us."

The thing starts, as if ready to fight back at being spoken to thus, but then reconsiders. It straightens, gives one sharp nod, and leaves. The door swings heavy behind its retreating steps.

Only when it's gone does Severus step toward her, toward the table, removing his cloak and draping it over the back of a chair. "What is this?"

"Plans. What, do you think the shop closes up when you leave?" She blows a breath across the parchment to finish the ink drying and then rolls it. "Mostly the thing's fault, really. I was ready to wallow but it thought we should work." She gives half a smile, thinking something ridiculous. "It's almost like it's trying to impress me."

Severus' mouth twists into the most unpleasant shape yet, which is a kind of confirmation.

"You have got to be kidding me. Really? You too?"

He's confessed two personal things in two minutes and it's clearly excruciating, if his terminally dour expression is anything to go by. "You are difficult."

"You are an idiot," she sighs. "Do you honestly need me to say it? You've always been--" Lily spreads her hands, helplessly. "I mean, even that  _ thing _ is enough of you to be--I can't believe I have to say it."

"Then don't," he said shortly. "It is the impulse of a child."

Why must he make everything ten times more difficult than it has to be? She crosses her arms, feeling like a child herself. "Fine. I won't." 

"It isn't why we need to speak privately." He sits across from her. "We have perhaps a month of safety left."

All joviality is wiped away. "What?"

"We have," he says slowly. "One month. If the Dark Lord's patience and trust holds."

"Until what?"

"He has asked for you." His face becomes clinical, cold, his voice smoothed of inflection, hands steepling before him. "He has heard that you have recovered from your illness and are now serving more publicly and capably. He wishes to see my work upon you. I suspect he wants to evaluate if any of the rumors are true, or possibly to evaluate my methodology to see if it could be replicated on others with similar allegiances. Likely both." His mouth goes thin. "I believe can delay him for a month, but no longer."

Lily's blood turns to ice. Her hands become fists and she only has the wherewithal to put her the map down before she crumples it. "Are you going to give me up?"

He glances at her sharply and the bottomless look blazing there in his face is too fierce by half. There's a deep offense and worse, the other, bladed thing that she cannot bear to look upon. She looks away and still feels the heat of it.

"Sorry." She rubs her temple. "I wasn't thinking."

"Clearly not." And she deserves the biting tone that comes along with it.

But there's a calculating voice in the back of her mind, a fragment of an idea. This, too, can be an opportunity. "What if you did, though? What if we do as he says and that's when we do it." Her voice descends to a whisper, as if anyone night have their ear pressed to the walls. "That's when we kill him."

"Don't be ridiculous."

"It's a shot. It's the only shot we might have."

"It's too dangerous."

"There's no other way--"

"Be  _ sensible _ ," he demands, his voice so forceful he manages to cut off her retort. He holds up one finger. "We do not currently possess the diadem. We have a lead on its general but not specific location, provided Dumbledore and Flamel are correct, but we do not possess it, and therefore cannot destroy it." Two more fingers. "There are, as of now, two other horcruxes we have yet to discover." Another. "We have no plan to destroy any of them and no assurances that any ideas to destroy them will successfully do so."

"What we do have is a month, which is not nothing."

His patience is fraying. It always did when he felt he wasn't being heard. "It is  _ not enough _ ."

"It could be. We managed to make a construct--managed to develop a whole new technique for their creation--almost  _ overnight. _ " She rakes her hand through her hair. "You're brilliant and I'm too stubborn to quit and between the two of us I think we could have him dead inside a month. I really do."

And how little he thinks of hope. "I never took you for a fool," he sneers.

From the vast catalog of filth, she takes a selection to tell him exactly what she thinks of that opinion and where he can stuff it, finishing with the greatest barb: "If you want me to cut you out of the whole thing, just say so."

It's crude leverage, but it works. The sneering, imposing creature crumples slightly into the more familiar, resigned man: both are  _ him _ but one is easier to contend with. "I should send you away."

"And leave you to face him alone? You'd have to kill me first."

Something odd and almost soft happens to his face, and he opens his mouth to speak, but she doesn't let him go on. "What we are  _ going _ to do," Lily speaks over him, "is infiltrate Hogwarts, find the diadem, figure out what the other two are and destroy the lot in a month, stab Tom Riddle in the back with a potions dagger, and what the hell, go out for a single malt and ice creams after. How does that sound?"

For half a second his lip quirks, almost like he might laugh even without hope, because she is absurd and smiling and sure of herself to a fault and he  _ does _ like that about her, he  _ must; _ and they know each other so well that he must know how scared she still is, he must know about the brave face she's putting on things. And he could almost laugh for it all.

\--Almost. It never makes it that far. His face goes smooth once more and the tiny flame of hope is extinguished. He sighs, and then says, "It sounds inevitable."


	30. Serpentine

The strangest part, Lily decides, is the fact that the grounds of Hogwarts haven't changed at all. The quiddich pitch is still standing with its hoops; proud little pureblood boys and girls could be zipping around on brooms in the morning. She's under the cloak and the moonlight falls right through her, straight to where her boots make their soft imprint on the grass.

Obliterating their footsteps behind them in the snow where it remains was tedious. The construct is silent, Disillusioned and padding before her under its own cloak, and beneath that a Death Eater mask and robes that aren't Severus' own. That's its own idea--if discovered, a ruse that could buy them time. But what it  _ can _ do is scale the outermost wall as if nothing is there, even though Lily can feel the heat radiating off of the wards that go straight up from the wall, so hot it's like standing in front of a fireplace. It's a beast, a thing, constructs are too obscure to guard against and any general ward that could keep it out would be terribly strong and fiendishly difficult. That part was easy enough; birds and beasts have always been able to traverse the wards freely, and while there is a resonant magic at the core of the thing in sympathy with Severus, it isn't really human--or if it is, the human part of it is still in Cokeworth, probably staring at the ceiling of his bedroom or working in the lab or, heaven knows, fretting at the hem of his bathrobe. Lily isn't fool enough to think he'll be sleeping during their expedition no matter how late the hour. 

The chain locking the side gate succumbs easily to a pair of plain muggle bolt-cutters, the door beyond the pitch takes an  _ alohamora _ simple as you please, and Lily is almost aghast at how easy this is right up until they enter the first floor and she hears it; a horrible sound, like the rasp of steel against stone, but also like something else entirely--almost a voice.

Lily has to risk it. "Do you hear that? Like--a sword, being sharpened, almost."

There's a moment of silence, the rustle of robes beside her, as it moves to try to catch the sound. "No," it whispers, shockingly close to her ear. "If you had allowed the time to do further research, it's been years since I've been in the castle and the changes--"

"Time we don't have. It's stopped anyway. Come on."

They've been loaded down with all the tools Severus could lay hands on inside of twenty-four hours; a sneakoscope letting off a steady low pulsation in her pocket (the whole  _ castle _ is Unplottable, after all, but it should get stronger if they come across anything really interesting); a variety of Dark Detectors of varying sensitivity and specificity (she's already had to turn three of them off, which is worrying but not entirely unexpected); and a bandolier loaded with healing potions, molotov cocktails, anything and everything Severus was sending to the front and could pilfer (he had been frustrated with its capacity and threatened to charm it to carry more until she pointed out it would be useless if she couldn't find anything on it).

The first stop is an initial cursory lap around the first floor, hoping for some kind of direction from the various sensors. One is in Lily's hand, a smooth and shiny black stone, concave on one side to fit her thumb, her favorite and the most useful one. It was modified for Albania to go off in a very peculiar way--a heat and, when close enough to truly powerful Dark magic like a horcrux, it gives horrible, sickening  _ thud-thud _ of vibration, like a living heart's beating in her palm. When they had made it, finally gotten it to respond only to the horcruxes in the books and no other Dark artifacts, it had heated in Lily's palm so quickly it left blisters, beating a wild tattoo that skittered it across the table. Lily's own spells managed to fix it, managed to shield it from whatever bizarre error in her spellwok had set it off, and from then on it had only worked in her palm, so: her favorite. Privately, it reminded her of Severus. They had decided it would have to be enough.

\--It isn't. There's nothing. Every step seems to suck the warmth from her palm until her fingers are stiff and cold curled around the detector and it doesn't so much as twitch.

"Dungeons," she whispers to the nothing next to her, but then she freezes. "There it is again. That sound."

"It sounds like water in the pipes," it mutters dismissively.

"It's  _ not _ , it's someone  _ talking _ \--"

The construct cuts her off, pulling her bodily into an alcove. It's invisible but its familiar palm is pressed to her mouth, and she hears what it has, what she's missed: footsteps. A thrill of fear runs through her.

The owner, some heavily-cloaked jackbooted caretaker--an elder, possibly slightly disgraced member of the Rowle family, if the resemblance and a faint recollection is anything to go on--trundles past them without a glance, grumbling about  _ that damn door _ and  _ bloody kids. _ There must've been something they tripped when they came in, something silent that woke this man.

The caretaker is still woozy with sleep, and his wand falls out of his fingertips just beyond their hiding place. It rolls away from him, toward them, stopping just short of Lily's boot. Muttering, the man curses, turns and looks--he  _ must _ sense them somehow, he's looking right at them. Lily stops breathing and the construct's hand tightens across her mouth. He takes one shuffling step and then another, fingertips reaching. Lily lifts her wand. If he has detected them, it would be safest--it would be  _ best _ \--to end it now, before he has his wand. It would be best to end  _ him _ now.

But she doesn't want to kill this old man in cold blood, not even if he's going to raise the alarm, not even in self-defense; not wanting to do a thing and not doing it are on entirely separate planets but she  _ doesn't want to-- _

He's reaching, his fingertips are on it, and then his wand is in his hand again and he's gone, down the hall, muttering about the children in this castle and how they'd all been raised in a barn.

When the footsteps fade and Lily's heartbeat returns from its manic pace to something normal, the palm lifts away. This is what Flamel was trying to tell her, and it chills her to the bone. That this could demand of her the death of not just Marked men and women, not just open adversaries, but innocents--people caught in the crossfire. Flamel had warned her, and she hadn't listened.

There's no time to worry over this particular question of morality. "Dungeons," she whispers again, and the construct's footsteps pad away toward the stairs to guide her. Tom Riddle was in Slytherin; it would make sense for him to stow a piece of his soul in the dungeons there.

Severus knows the dungeons better than Lily ever will, and this construct guides her unerringly through as much as it can; secret passageways and hidden corridors, past the Slytherin common room where Lily remembers the end of one particularly nasty argument with a queer jolt of nostalgia, classroom after classroom, each door charmed to ease open silently.

It's maddening. It's exhausting, nothing like searching the house. In her pockets, two more Dark Detectors have to be turned off, leaving only the one in her hand; the Slytherins have been at work and there are doors they cannot open silently. She could be walking past the horcrux a thousand times over and never know.

As they explore, it becomes distressingly clear that it would be very, very easy for all of this to fail and very few ways to succeed. The secondary plan--kidnap a house-elf and let Severus work whatever cruelty he can upon it for information--looks horribly likely. They won't leave empty-handed. While she had known this for a theoretical, it is slightly more horrible to contemplate when facing down the actuality. Smaller evils weighed out on a grand scale against bigger evils until the balance is found and hope no one comes out too tarnished for the weighing.

They dodge Slughorn with greater ease as he sleepily makes patrol around the corridors; he never was terribly perceptive. They press themselves to a wall to allow the Bloody Baron to pass, even as Lily considers waylaying him to ask questions about Helena Ravenclaw. But that ghost was taught by Salazar Slytherin himself, and it would be too optimistic to believe he'd help a silly little muggle-born sneaking around the school.

The only luck is that no alarm goes off. No hue and cry. One wandering cat who can clearly smell them catches a sleeping hex and curls up on the spot. But there's also no horcrux, nothing even close to it, nothing even worth inspecting.

It's almost a half-hour before the sound comes again, clearer than it ever has been, while they are sneaking past a snake-covered tapestry hanging in the wall--it sounds as if it's coming from within the tapestry, within the walls, and again, it's almost speech she can understand,  _ almost _ . She lays one hand on the wall through the tapestry, then another, then presses her ear to it.  And the part of it that sounds like a voice resolves itself, finally, into words:

"I smell a mudblood," it says, so close it might have been whispering in her ear.

Lily leaps away from the wall so violently that it sends her crashing into the opposite. But nothing comes for her, no wand, no green light, not even a doxy. Her head snaps left, then right, then straight ahead toward the tapestry. "Did you hear  _ that _ ?"

The construct makes an aborted, nasal sound--it's heard  _ something _ . The sound continues, and failing any other plan, she creeps back toward it. Whatever this is, it wasn't here when she was in school, or--if the construct's silence is anything to go on--when Severus was here more recently.

Her fingertip traces one of the snakes on the tapestry. "Hello?" she whispers.

The blade-against metal sound increases to an almost jaw-aching intensity, and it says in that same voice: "Master?"

Very quickly--very,  _ very _ quickly--Lily makes several deductions and one decision.

First, whatever this thing is, it can tell her blood status by smell and it can track her, and that is a problem. No one uses that slur these days without violent intent.

Second, it can both understand speech and speak, and can be confused by her. It can't identify her as the muggle-born it senses--yet _ \-- _ but  _ master _ is quite a lot to work with in the balance of things.

Third, it is in the walls somehow. Whatever it is--ghost, creature, malevolent twisted spirit of the castle itself--it can trespass where they cannot. It must be huge to making the surrounding and encompassing noise it is capable of, or powerfully magical, or both, and Lily isn't looking forward to meeting it. Keeping it in the walls seems both dead useful and more likely to keep them both safe.

It resolves itself into an idea that becomes a decision, one she makes instantaneously: if some presumably-malevolent force creeping throughout the walls is sensitive enough to smell blood-status through walls, then it is likely sensitive enough to know where a horcrux is in the castle. And there's only one person she can think of this thing would be calling  _ master. _

The silver eyes of the serpents in the tapestry glitter at her like they're alive. "Yes, I am your master. I hid something here a very long time ago. Something that smells like  _ me. _ I need your help to find it again."   
  


For a wild second, the rasping sound grows even louder, stranger, new, and she wonders if it's all gone wrong already, lost her gamble, overstepped finally beyond the bounds of what can be recovered from--

It says, "Follow."

The sound moves away down the hall and moves to dart after it, and then halts, noticing a lack of fellow footsteps behind her. "What are you waiting for?" she hisses. "Come  _ on _ ."

It falls in line, soft padding steps along her own. Severus is taller than her by a head and so is the thing, so it has to duck to whisper to her. "What did you do?"

"I talked to it. Didn't you hear me talking to it? It can talk, I talked back, it called me master and I took a gamble. Was there some kind of jinx that stopped you hearing all that?"

"No," it says shortly. "I wouldn't describe what you were doing as  _ talking. _ "

"What is that supposed to mean?"

It doesn't answer, and she can't interrogate it and also follow the sound as silently as possible, which has picked up speed and is ascending stairs upon stairs.

By the time they reach the seventh floor, she's almost given up on stealth; she thought she saw another pet cat run away from the sound so she supposes whatever this thing is, it scares even the residents. She suspects it should. She suspects it should scare her more, too.

Where it stopped, it seems there is nothing; no doors, no statues, just an ugly tapestry with dancing trolls and a darkened hall.

"What now?" Lily asks.

The voice in the wall doesn't answer, just maintains its alien rattle.

"You are leading us," the construct mutters, the implication being  _ and you've brought us here, so figure it out _ .

"I'm not leading us, the thing in the walls is," she whispers, pressing the heel of her hand to her forehead. She paces away, almost to the tapestry, thinking furiously and trying to ignore the noise, and then back, and then away, and then back--

"Lily--"

It hasn't said her name before, she realizes, and the way it does it arresting. She spins on her heel toward it, and there's a door where, moments ago, there was only a wall.

And the cold pebble in her hand suddenly heats in her fingers.

There's no room for hesitation. If the door can appear, it can disappear, and the detector doesn't lie, not like this. She opens it, flings her body through, into whatever lies beyond.

The construct follows only after a moment's hesitation, shutting the door as quietly and as quickly as possible behind them.

\--What is beyond is chaos. It is not the safe, curated, trapped place she had anticipated, not the sanctum sanctorum or even a pit filled with spikes or snakes or spiders or ghosts. Thin moonlight filters through tall windows that stretch from the floor to the distant ceiling, illuminating crooked towers of--it steals Lily's breath to realize it-- _ junk _ . It's dumping ground: ruined potions, broken furniture, books doused in pumpkin juice and covered in graffiti stacked far above her head, half-melted cauldrons, joke items she recognizes from her time at Hogwarts and older things that must be more of the same, broomsticks and cloaks and student's robes and weapons and every imaginable illicit item ever smuggled into a school by idiot children who didn't understand the danger of magic.

This isn't the Dark Lord's hiding place. This is just a hiding place. If it's his, too, then he's a greater fool than even Lily had thought.

She looks around the maze to try and get her bearings, but there's no time to dwell or marvel; the sneakoscope's vibration in her pocket is so violent she has trouble removing it and casting a freezing charm to stop it. They are not unheard; something rustles in the distance, and a shadow passes across a window. The black pebble she's been carrying this whole time is still warm in her palm, but isn't doing anything more, and Lily holds her breath, holds it up in her fingertips, giving it a small shake.

And then it lets out one sluggish pulse.

"Turns out he's an idiot," Lily says breathlessly into the air, pushing the hood of the invisibility cloak back onto her shoulders.

The construct is making sure the door is secure before it turns. "What's happened?" There's a sense of warmth, a solid body invisibly standing before her. "What does it detect?"

Lily flicks the front of the cloak, exposing her forearm and the Dark Dectector in her palm. "It's detecting  _ something _ ."

A fingertip's worth of pressure comes on the stone in her palm, testing the heat there. "Then we follow it." 

Far away, deep in the room, there is a half-human, half-monstrous scream, and they both turn to look into the dim rest of the room.

"Lead the way." There's a movement of air in front of her face--a hand that fluttered past her cheek, almost reaching to touch her but then retreating, as if remembering who and what it is.

Lily tugs the hood back over her face and starts to withdraw the arm back beneath her cloak, and then stops and extends it again. "Take my hand. We don't want to get separated."

The palm that meets her and the fingers that entwine are cool and familiar and hold tight. It might not really be him, but it's close enough.

Hand in hand, they begin to slide along the front wall where the door is to get their bearings. The heat ebbs and flows in the detector until she finds a place to enter the labyrinth where she thinks it's warmest. They step over brooms, over bones, over weapons at the end of a long dark trail of stain rendered black in the darkness. Past a stuffed troll, past a cabinet, where the pulse picks up and Lily's heart mirrors it, past another cupboard with blistered lacquer that stinks the way only rotting flesh can. As they move deeper, the beating ebbs, and Lily moves backward until she's back at the cabinet once more and the detector is fluttering in her palm like the beating of a rabbit's heart in the mouth of a wolf. She drops the thing's hand as she turns.

\--And there it is. No tricks. No traps. No guile. It's just like the drawings, sitting among the trash. There's a bust of a wizard sitting on a stack of pages torn from a book, there's a wig and enchanted playing cards whose faces keep half-changing between suits--clubs to hearts, hearts to clubs--and atop the small illustrated crowns there is a tiara adorned with blue gems. 

"This is--don't  _ touch _ it, Severus!" But it's already in its hand--floating midair--and she doesn't even have time to correct herself calling it by his name. She digs in a pocket and pulls out a handkerchief and extends it past the cloak. "Use this, at least."

"It's inert. It must be placed on the head to effect its curse," it says, a note of wonder in its voice, wrapping the diadem in the handkerchief. There's a breath's hesitation, and then: "Have you always been a parselmouth and I just never knew?"

"A--what?" 

It's fading into sight; just an outline, the profile of nose and long hair coming into focus. The Disillusionment must be wearing off. It had been due; she'll have to recast it before whatever is screaming comes for them, but that is less interesting than what it's saying just now. "I know what it is, the thing that guided us here. I don't know if it can get in here."

  
The definition of  _ parselmouth _ comes back to her. "You think it's a snake?"

The scream that echoed around the chamber when they began their search echoes again. The familiar face looks up, around, and then back to her. "Worse. A basilisk. I thought I had-- _ he, _ the real one--"

"Spit it out," she snaps, impatient.

The eyes turn on her, and she can see in them a rising worry. It speaks quickly. "Slytherin's chamber of secrets contained a monster to enforce blood-purity. Everyone thought it was a myth until the Dark Lord unleashed the monster on the school. It killed any muggle-borns that tried to return to Hogwarts after the siege. No one was completely sure what it was, not when it killed so quickly and with such stealth, but it fits."

Her heart leaps into her throat. They aren't prepared for a basilisk. "How did you know? It's not as if you've  _ seen _ it. You'd be dead."

The increasingly visible face looks momentarily furious. "You hissed at the wall, Lily, and  _ it hissed back _ . It fits." Its face crumples slightly. "You will have to tell the other this detail. My guesses will not be as good as his about what this means."

She skips past  _ why don't you tell him yourself _ and goes straight for the red meat. "So what does it mean? And you're going solid again, let me--"

The scream they heard earlier comes once more, this time from much closer, and both of their heads snap round to look for it.

"We are out of time," it says, its face hard, like it's just made a decision and isn't telling her what the decision is yet. Lily doesn't like that look, doesn't trust it, but it knows well enough to hustle her along before she can protest. "We must flee. Now."

"You're not--we could hold them--"

" _ Now, _ Lily!" it snarls, and snatches up her wrist to pull her behind.

Severus' legs are longer than her own and so are the construct's, so Lily is breathless and half-dragged behind it as it runs unerringly back down the path they came, leaping broken broomstick pieces and sending broken wands rolling behind them.

"It just looked like an oversized doxy," Lily calls. "We can handle one man-sized doxy. There's no need--"

"Doxies never give chase alone," he replies, neither looking at her nor slowing. "I do not fancy meeting a flock of oversized, hungry doxies with one wand and a cursed object to protect between us." One long arm darts out, tugs on a single tattered volume from a stack, sending the tower topping behind them to block the path. Lily follows suit, kicking at a wardrobe with twisted doors leaning crooked against a stack of armor, and the heap is sent rolling across floor with an almighty crash. 

Around another corner and there it is: the door, just a few dozen paces away, a distance covered in moments. From beyond the door, they can hear it: the rasp of the scales on stone. Knowing what it is, now, it's unmistakable. And from behind, it's more than one, it has to be a flock by the sound--

Lily presses her ear to the door and hears a hissing tirade so violent-- _ kill rip tear-- _ she starts back from the door. "The snake is out for blood."

The thing turns, finally, pressing the kerchief-wrapped diadem into her hand in place of its palm. "I'm going to open this door. You stand at the side and run as soon as the basilisk comes through."

Lily looks behind them, and the monsters that have been chasing them finally emerge from the heap of junk, prowling, eyes alight; blue-skinned and taller than Lily, stunted gossamer wings preventing true flight but buzzing just the same, and the teeth--precious as a pomeranian's on a pest--are sharp and big enough to rip her throat out and dripping with slaver.

She tucks the diadem away and blasts monstrous doxy away over a stack of broken chairs, another into the air, but two move in to replace each one she blasts. The thing that stands before her is disposable, and she is being absurd, but she hesitates. "What about you?"

"Don't," it says, groping for her shoulder in thin air and, finding it, giving her shoulder a little shove into place against the wall as if securing her.

More of the monsters fall to more blasting hexes and even invisible they've targeted her, prowling forward, and there are too damn many. They'll be on them--both of them--if they don't act, and Lily can't think of any other way to escape either of the threats closing in on each side of the door.

It's now or never. The thing with Severus' face closes its eyes, hand on the doorknob, and  _ pulls _ \--

The rasping hiss of the great horrible snake is upon them both as the door swings wide. It makes a horrible sound--a sound that is both a slur and a scream and a hiss all at once--and the serpent strikes.

The construct doesn't flinch, doesn't move; it can't see it coming but it must hear, it  _ must _ , and it stands there brave and stiff as a flagpole. The fangs catch it on the neck, and blood sprays in an arc up and back, splattering her face. A wardrobe explodes as the weight of a centuries-old monster whips through it, and the door flies through the air to explode at her feet. The scream the emerges from the construct is too familiar, too much, too horrible to contemplate, and then suddenly silenced as the beast opens its mouth wider--horribly wider--and  _ swallows _ .

The snake's coils pile inward and inward, endless, enormous, the other threat scattering to the rafters like so many wind-up dolls. The last of the tail filling the doorway thrashes past her and strikes her bodily, crushing her momentarily to the wall; the breath goes out of her and there is an almighty and sickening  _ crack _ from somewhere in her body where the diadem's hard gems have crushed a rib.

But the cloak is still on her, and it doesn't have her scent yet, and there is nothing else she can do. Lily does what it's told her, for once. Limping, hand pressed to her side, she darts through the open door, past the last of the basilisk's tail, and she runs and runs and runs.


	31. Cracked

It's only when she takes off her cloak that the diadem slips out of the handkerchief and onto the floor, and the racket truly is so terrible in the huge, echoing room that it brings Severus to the banister from the lab. So, she was right there. He wasn’t sleeping.

Lily looks up at him in wonder, realizing he is still here. Even though she watched the blood pump out of the wound, even though she had heard the voice cry out in the throes of death, she is buoyed up by his face: alive, breathing, still.

His face tells her she looks half-dead. "Where are you hurt," he demands, wand out, voice hard, as he comes down the stairs.

"Nowhere," she says, voice hoarse. Her ribs give another twinge, but she can't pay attention to it. Breathing hurts. Talking hurts. Everything hurts, and is confusing, and she's about to crack up. But there's nothing to say about it.

His wand passes over her face anyway, followed by his thumb gently smearing the dried blood. His eyes are clinical at first but then go to hers and his fingers freeze before they draw away.

"Where is it," he asks, though it seems he must know.

"Gone. It-- it died." She swallows. "To let me escape with this." With the toe of her boot, she nudges the diadem, still half-shrouded in the handkerchief.

He looks down at it as if it has answers she isn't giving. He bends before her, picking it up,

As he rises, she asks the question that's been haunting her mouth since she pelted out of the castle: "Are you going to die for me?"

He contemplates the diadem through the handkerchief, and his voice is abstract. "Perhaps."

"No." Her voice breaks. "Promise me you won't."

"I will do what is necessary." Even meeting her eyes, he is dismissive. "I do not make promises I can't keep."

"I just watched something with your face--your voice, your mind--die a painful death. Without hesitation." She swallows, takes a step closer, the hem of her cloak almost draping the toes of his boots. "For me."

"Yes, I imagine it did."

"Why?"

She looks into his eyes, and something absolutely endless looks back. It's obvious, she takes it in a flash:

It's what  _ he _ would do.

So he knows it's what the thing would have done. It's why he didn't put up as much of a fight against this plan. He knew there was a willing victim waiting to sacrifice itself for her, should it come to it. Without hope, without magic, without anything but the knowledge that its death could keep her safe for a little while longer.

Taken in like that, it's breathtaking. And her course is obvious.

"Severus," she begins, "I don't know what you think I feel--"

"Don't," he cuts her off, harsh. "Whatever that thing was, whatever it looked like, whatever it may have said to you, it was a tool. It fulfilled its use. Don't become sentimental."

He's gone, under that stone. She wants to crack him open. "Will you  _ listen? _ This isn't about that. This is about you and me."

"Then there is nothing to discuss," he says coldly, and turns.

She catches his arm, turning him back toward her, and swallows the rest with a kiss.

It's clumsier than the others had been, starting at the corner of his mouth and proceeding with a grinding of teeth and a negotiation of noses, but after a startled moment he bends to meet her anyway, fingertips worrying at the tie at the end of her braid if he wants to pull it free or use it to tether her there in space like a kite string. She can't help but think that this should have been it, this should have been the first time, not those two cold and calculated tools she has prised from him. No, this is flint for fire that could burn down the house around them. And she wants it to. She can hear it, now, that drumbeat calling her to war or something worse.

"You need to listen to me," she says, breathless, against his hollow cheek.

He doesn't answer; instead, he draws a thumb down the nape of her neck. It's only the slightest movement but from him, it's an unthinkable brazen audacity--he's  _ never, _ he would  _ never _ before--and it sends electricity shooting up her spine. Lily shivers. He pauses, taking in her response like an experimental result-- _ listening-- _ and does it again, this time dipping barely beneath the collar of her shirt to where the tag presses against her skin.

And his other hand goes to her waist and, damn it all, she flinches, and she's pressed tight enough to him that he feels it.

His hand moves to her shoulder, pulling her away. "Your ribs." His other hand settles to her side again and it is the touch of a doctor more than-- _ more than what? _ she asks herself.  _ What are you looking for, Evans? _

For half a second Lily considers how best to disentangle herself to better slap him across the face. Or to pull him closer. Or both. Power, it's always about  _ power _ , and now he's got it and now he's taking it with him. It's cruel, is what it is, and it's rude, and she really ought to hit him or kiss him again or do  _ something _ , standing still is agony. Something is moving upward in her chest, and it might be a knot of tears or something more terrible, but no amount of swallowing is pressing it down back into her stomach.

Instead, she draws back to the distance he's established, straightens up, yes-sir, as if she kisses him like the house could burn down around them every day. For the first time, she really believes she could.

“You need to be treated,” he mutters, distracted. “Upstairs in the lab, if you can manage it.”

She can. She's made it this far.

The diadem is too large to put inside of a book, so he shoves it unceremoniously into a desk drawer in the library before leading her across to the lab.

Lily lifts herself onto the workbench and watches his back move before her: his spine’s soft curve discernible through his robes, the limp hair licking at the back of his neck as his head moves up and down, scanning shelves.

“I will need to see.” He sounds uncomfortable with the request, almost ridiculous, but she doesn't dare laugh at him just now. She doffs her robes gingerly and unbuttons her shirt from the bottom up, reclining onto one elbow to give him access to her side.

As he bends to inspect her side, she asks, "Don't you want to debrief?"

"No. You must stop chattering. I don't want to set the bone incorrectly." His wand and hands move over her, pressing carefully into the cracked ribs and muttering a spell.

As Severus' tincture and spells do their work, Lily's breathing comes a bit easier and the anxious energy drains out of her in favor of flat exhaustion. The pain, the running, the fear, the dull effort of carrying the horcrux have all taken their toll. Leaning into the touch of a man trying to set a bone is counterproductive and he doesn't really allow it, not til it's mostly done and he is merely looking over his work, but by the end it's the only thing anchoring her to consciousness. Finally, he lifts his cold fingertips from her skin.

"So," he says. "You escaped with the diadem but it died in the attempt. What else?"

But it's too much, now. Her fingers go to her temple. "Can it wait? I'm--god, Severus, this has been a hell of a night and I'm dead on my feet. In the morning?"

He watches her, evaluating for a few moments, then gives a curt nod. "In the morning, then."

Lily lifts herself off the table, not bothering to do back up her shirt. It's only when she trudges to the top of the steps, all the way to the familiar door, that she hears it: a soft weeping.

Of course. The deer, the other construct. There isn't enough caring in Lily at this hour of night to wonder why it's weeping; perhaps it's out of flowers to eat. Perhaps it's sad it's no longer the only thing with her face here to catch the light of his eyes. Perhaps it's jammed a toe. She doesn't care.

Severus' bedroom door is open a crack and she lets herself in. Water is running in the bathroom. She goes to a drawer, then another, and tries to find a shirt too big for him that she can wear. She only comes up with a battered old green thing shoved to the back, some holdover from his youth that's still too tight, but it'll have to do. Bothering the thing seems like more trouble than it's worth and she's already here. She drops the rest of her clothes in a heap on the floor and crawls into the other side of the bed. A flick of her wand shuts off the lights, but there's too much moonlight flowing through the window, so she drapes her arm over her face.

She's half-asleep when the door opens. Two footsteps, then: "What are you doing."

It takes a moment to register the question. "The thing. It's in my room. Sleeping in the library is rubbish and I could get lost in this bed it's so big." She gestures vaguely to the door, the ocean of sheet and bedding around her.

"And you have chosen  _ here. _ " It's the opposite of a seduction: it's cold water. "Why."

"I was hoping you would share." She opens one eye, peers out at him. He's in a nightshirt and dressing-gown, hair wet and fat droplets slithering jealously down his neck, looking even more like the reedy skinny thing he is than usual. "It was fine before.” It was also an accident, but  _ accident _ and  _ fine _ are not mutually exclusive.

He's looking at her, lip curled like he's about to say something horrible, but nothing comes out. Finally he settles on, "You are wearing my shirt."

"Are you going to keep pointing out the obvious?" She's used to it, this possessiveness, this desire to keep his things his own. "So I am. Is it some Slytherin motto on the front? Are you going to tell McGonagall on me?"

"Don't be ridiculous." He looks like he could strangle her.

"All right. All  _ right." _ She swings her legs over the edge of the bed, pinches her fingers across her eyes and stands up. "Sorry. I wasn't thinking. I'm being horrible and presumptuous and--everything. I’m sorry. I'll go."

She bends at the waist to scoop up her things from the floor where she's left them when he's standing in front of her, seizing her chin, pulling her up to face him. For a second her eyes flutter shut, on instinct, as if it's going to be a kiss, one he gives her, a gift she can finally receive.

None comes. Her eyes open again and he's there, holding her, scrutinizing, the black scribble of the Mark on his arm exposed.

"Why are you doing this?" he says softly, as if there's someone else in the room who could answer.

She could say anything— _ you are so stupid _ or  _ think about it for more than a second _ or even  _ yes, goddammit, I’m a living trap made just for you, now kiss me like you’re meant to, you dunderhead _ . “You think I’m under the Curse? Sent to expose you?”

His face is a mask, a wall, but his eyes search her own: a gentle push of Legillimency that he knows she will feel, a thing that she allows as his fingertips hold her still. But there is nothing to find. His words come low, riveting. “I do not know what to think.”

She blows air through her nose, frustrated. "What can I tell you to convince you that I'm where I want to be?"

Severus says nothing, just watches her face, holding her chin there like a disobedient school child, openly suspicious.

The same old anger flares, evaporating the exhaustion. Lily knocks his hand away and snaps, "Come off it. In case you missed it, Severus, we are winning this war."

"That is an illusion," he dismisses with a wave of his hand, as if he'd chosen to release her rather than been rebuked.

"There are two left to find and then he can be killed. I'm not scared."

He's getting angry, too. "You should be. In a few weeks he will demand to see you and there will be nothing I can do to protect you."

Lily takes a step closer, snarling, "I don't need to be protected!"

And he meets her with equal certainty, fists clenched and fierce. "Yes, you do." It's only the slightest movement, but they're so close, she couldn't miss it. Over his gritted teeth, his eyes flick down. She's just standing there in only her old knickers and a borrowed tee shirt, and the implication is clear: _you need to be protected from me--_ not just from the Mark on his arm and all it represents, but from his desire, a thing shoved so far down that it's grown vast, monstrous, ravenous. It's enough to heat the air between their bodies, to spark electricity in her gut.

"I'm perfectly capable of defending myself." Lily reaches with a fingertip, and he jumps at the touch as she traces the course of a droplet of water from below his ear, over his jaw, down his throat until it touches the nightshirt **.**

"Stop that." He seizes her wrist but doesn't pull her hand away from his chest. "You are someone else's wife."

The words that leap to her lips aren't what someone under the Imperius Curse would say. They aren't a seduction or a promise. They're just true. "I've never belonged to anyone but myself and you would do well to remember that."

"You will think differently, when the memory charm breaks down fully."

She looks down and shakes her head, pulling her braid over her shoulder with her free hand and worrying at the end of it. This is the real reason, the real thing holding him back. “I can’t remember them at all, Severus. I can’t and I don't think I ever will.” A rough, dry swallow, and a sigh. “It’s been weeks since anything new came back. The rest all came back fast, like a waterfall, but this--there's nothing. I have facts about them, faces, even moments, but it's like reading a textbook. It's like I'm not even there, like a movie, like watching it happen to someone else. I have everything else: all my training with the Order, friends I knew and am still grieving for, things Dumbledore told me that I won’t repeat even now, but--" She has to meet his eyes for this, has to let him see. "James and Harry are dead. There's nothing left of them, not even ghosts. They're gone, and I'm here." The last words come out in a whisper. "With you."

His reply comes slow, pitched so quiet it could mean anything. "So you are."

He's still holding her wrist, and with his other hand he reaches for her shoulder--for one paralyzing moment, Lily thinks it could be to push her out the door--but instead it's to slip the end of her braid from her grasp so he can rub it between his index finger and thumb. It's the only point of contact other than his unrelenting cold grip around her wrist and for a second she wonders if he will take it and lead her like an animal on a tether. 

But instead he smooths the ends between his fingertips and carefully, deftly, removes the tie holding it together. From the bottom, he works his fingers into the braid, loosening it, freeing her hair. It takes an excruciating amount of time--it is terrifyingly like being undressed without being undressed at all _ \-- _ and he does it slowly, unknitting it loop by loop and smoothing his fingers all the way to the ends of the waves pressed there as they are freed. Some kind of decision is being worked through, and it's made once he reaches the nape of her neck and lets his palm cup the back of her skull.

It's his left, of course. The fangs of the serpent tattooed on his forearm is pressed to her throat, painted against her skin in lines slightly warmer than the rest of his skin.

She wraps her fingers around it so she doesn't have to see it.

He is very still and she watches his face try to hide the thoughts passing beneath it, but there is no covering up that hunger at this distance, no disguising that bottomless need when she is so close to it, and if he is  _ going _ to pull her towards him he had better bloody well  _ do it _ \--

Her mouth goes crooked, as if she's said it all aloud. Perhaps she has. "Please," she says.

He lets out a desperate little breath--one he's been holding--and it could be a rueful laugh if it weren't robbed of sound. The hand at the back of her neck tilts her chin back and back and he's closed the distance between them. 

He kisses her like he is trying to capture her smile and hold it in time, as if he's going to put it into a jar and keep it on a shelf. His thumb draws down the back of her neck again and she shivers and, wildly, Lily thinks maybe it's  _ this, _ this is the one that should have been the first, one where they're on equal footing at last--

She pulls him the few steps backward by the front of the dressing gown, and they tumble down together. There's a war of both pairs of hands trying to pull at the hem of the pilfered shirt, a moment of nigh-hysterical confusion when she's trapped inside it and trying to shimmy out of her knickers at the same time, and it's just not  _ working _ until it does and then she's naked, the shirt's fluttering to the floor and her hair's gone wild but he's pulled back, palms pressed to the tops of her thighs and the way he's looking at her is like nothing so much as a butcher.

A flush crawls up her chest, and she feels every inch of her skin as he rakes his gaze across it, sensing every imperfection, every stretch mark, every blemish exposed, weighted, photographed for later inspection. Her mouth opens as if she's going to say  _ sorry that I'm not everything you were hoping for  _ but she's not sorry in the least and neither is he, clearly, there's proof enough of  _ that _ brushing tantalizingly against the inside of her thigh--

"Don't stop," she says breathlessly.

There's a kind of bated madness in his face, restraint hanging by a thread. "Are you sure," he asks quietly.

She reaches up, lacing her fingers into his hair and giving it a tug to pull him closer. "Don't make me ask you a third time."

And the  _ sound _ he makes then, a thrum deep in his throat--

His mouth moves across her cheekbone, brushing past her earlobe, bowing to reach her throat, and his hands move, skimming her skin and raising goosebumps, never lingering or grasping, as if he could break her too easily. There is something unnamable blazing through her like a wildfire, prickling down her spine. She pulls at the knot in his dressing gown, lifts the nightshirt, and there is a hollow at his sternum that fits her palm. She spreads her hand across it, into it, into him. He trembles for a moment like a virgin at the end of the world--and who knows? Maybe he is, and maybe it is. He places each kiss across her body with precision, as if his mouth were a knife and he were seeking to slice her open, some kind of benevolent vivisection, but she can dissect him too, she can undo him, and she wants to. Her fingers run further and he arches against her, seeking friction, and she hisses with triumph, putting her teeth to his collarbone.

Lovemaking, Lily will reflect afterward, is a dangerous misnomer. Sex makes nothing most of the time, least of all love. She will think in days and weeks to come that she should have foreseen that much. But calling it anything less seems also to miss the point; there is love in this. It is nothing she can claim ownership of, nothing pure or noble or complete about this love, but belongs to both of them just the same. 

So lovemaking it is. Severus is a quick study, a man of experimental precision, and she is all teeth and nails leaving marks across his shoulders. He is so careful with her body that it must be both a tight-leashed ferocity and a deliberate torment--he's not  _ gentle _ or  _ kind _ , never  _ kind-- _ and she almost tears his hair out before he drags a howl out of her, an unhinged, animal sound he stifles with a hand over her mouth. And when he spends himself, he crushes her so tightly to the angles of his body that, for an instant at the apex, neither of them can breathe.

The rest is lost to skin and moonlight.


	32. The Flood

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I warned you.

\--She wakes.

Warm, muted sun is trickling in through half-closed curtains. Lily is suspended halfway between wakefulness and sleep, not wanting to break the spell of comfort. She hasn’t felt like this in years, it seems. But slowly, steadily, as if borne on a river’s current, she is moving toward waking up. There is work to be done. Harry will need to be fed. But James’ hand is pressing gently into her stomach, his hair soft and strangely silken where his forehead rests against the nape of her neck. She can feel his breaths moving in and out on her spine, warm and alive. He is curled against her back, around her, ankles tangled her own, one arm holding her and the other sprawled beneath her head. But she will have to get up. Harry will have to be fed. There is work to be done, even though they can't leave the house since the Fidelius charm. Too much danger. Too many already dead or worse. But Sirius will be coming by soon, or perhaps Peter, with news--what day is it, that would tell her who--

With a sigh, she opens her eyes, looking at James’ hand curled before her, at the end of the arm snaked beneath her head. Something about it is wrong. James’ hands are always soft and clean and smooth, tanned on their broad backs. This hand is more delicate, spidery and pale but marked and crisscrossed with old burns and half-healed scratches and scars. One knuckle is recently bloodied, only barely scabbed over. James is meticulous with his hands--he would always apply dittany ointment to any injury, afraid it might harm his dueling reflexes if he let a cut heal wrong or left something untreated. It is a habit he inherited from his somewhat fragile mother--

Something has happened to James’ hand.

Still afloat on sleep, she rolls over to greet the body laying next to her, the hand hanging across her middle skidding along her skin. It flexes--a stretch possesses the body next to hers, revealing the inner forearm where a black tattoo of a snake twined around a skull is inked against pale skin, a symbol that strikes a fear deeper than sleep can touch in her.

It is not James, she realizes slowly, but then who--

She completes her revolution, and he finishes his stretch, pressing his hand against the small of her back. In sleep, his brow is smooth and unhampered in a way it almost never is when he is awake. His hair is a dark, tangled mess spread across the pillow like veins of contagion. His lips are parted beneath his hooked nose--his mother’s nose--and his narrow chest rises and falls with slow, deep breaths. And the Mark, of course, the vile lines of ownership she had been so arrogant as to cover with her fingers, as if her touch alone could blot it out. It's there as well, blackened sockets and serpent against to the bare skin just below her breast, as if to press a kiss there with a lipless mouth, as if to transfer its ownership to her, too.

Severus. It’s Severus.

She sits up quickly, sheets pooling around her waist, and he doesn’t disappear, James does not materialize from the sheets, and the world only becomes sharper and emptier. Harry will not have to be fed. Harry will never waken in the night and demand feeding or comfort again. She has a long life of uninterrupted sleep before her. And it has been like this--it has been like this for years. She has shared her life with this man, this Death Eater, the man who left them to die and took what he wanted.

For a long moment, it as if she has been split in two--as if there are two selves within her, one who has just awoken years after she went to sleep and wants to scream and scream and never stop, and another who wishes to brush a strand of hair from his cheek and simply watch him laid bare like this, as so few see him. But the skull on Severus' arm is not just a symbol of the Dark Lord but of her husband, her child, what they have become over long years in the grave while the man still sleeping next to her stroked her hair and kissed her forehead and grew her  _ wildflowers _ \--

She tries to smother the horror of this moment, but a shrill, whimpering whine escapes her, like a trapped animal, and--of course he is a light sleeper, she knows he is a light sleeper--the sound wakes him.

His eyes ease open and find her, and she can’t help herself, she scuttles away on hands and knees off the enormous bed, snatching up his discarded dressing gown in the process and wrapping it around her shoulders. She presses herself to the far wall and feels along it toward the master bath.

In the bed, he sits up and follows her movements as sharply as a predator from behind a tangled curtain of his hair. He opens his mouth as if to speak, as if to defile her name again with his mouth the same way he has defiled her body, but the doorknob to the master bath is beneath her fingertips, and she flings herself through it and slams it shut behind her.

She takes a solid minute to calm her heaving chest. When Lily turns, the mirror reflects her sorry state. Her chest is flushed, and the robe hangs open between her breasts and all the way down, incriminating her. There's a bite mark just above her heart and her hand goes to cover it, fingernails digging in, as if she could tear it off. Her hands scrabble with the sash, pulling it shut and tying a clumsy knot.

Her bones are so old. She has lived so long, outlived her child and her husband, even outlived the wound of their passing. Nothing has healed over these years of distance, merely hung open like something that should have been stitched shut. The scar is that much worse for it. 

Cold water on her face helps dispel her panic a little. Only a little. Not enough. But there is nothing to be gained from sitting in the bathroom. There is only one thing her two halves can agree on, and it is that there is nothing to be gained from staring into her own horrible reflection in the bathroom.

She opens the door.

He is getting dressed with his back to her, trousers already on, buttoning his shirt, shaking out and turning up the cuffs, covering the Mark. His own clothes have been put away--this is his bedroom, his house, his world, after all, everything here belongs to him. Even the shaking, cowering thing peering at him from around the doorframe.

She steps out, bare-footed, into the room. The click of the bathroom door shutting brings him around to face her.

Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. There are no words for this, and she blinks rapidly, trying to clear her eyes. “Oh, god--” she chokes out, and shades her face with her hands to shield the ugly contortions of crying.

He comes to her in a flash, cuffs forgotten and trailing, revealing the snake's head and the teeth in the naked jaw on the Mark. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I shouldn’t--I should have--” His hands are on her shoulders, her arms.

“I remember,” she gasps, her words muffled by her hands. “I remember everything.”

Severus' grip on her arms loosens in shock and dawning horror. He makes an aborted half-movement, as if to draw her into his arms and provide comfort. And then he swallows, straightens, like a man trying to be brave facing the gallows. "That is what you wanted. Isn't it?"

There is no answer for it. But the question lights the fire, burning like a beacon, like a lighthouse to her. She shoves him weakly, once, and fails to dislodge him. “You took me from them,” she howls. “You took me from them, and they died--”

He shakes his head, heavy, slow. “There was nothing you could have done.”

“You don’t know that!”

“You just would have died with them--”

“Why didn’t you let me?”

Anger, finally. “There was no point in it! He was going to kill your son and anyone who stood in his way would die.”

Anger is something she can fight against. “Then I should have died!” She pulls at his shirt, straining futilely to scratch at his flesh, to tear him to ribbons. “I should have died, or you should have saved all three of us! Why didn’t you save all three of us?”

But the answer is obvious. He doesn’t have to say it, it’s staring back out at her like an unspoken agreement, like a contract she’s signed, written as clearly across him just as his desire was the night before. It’s always been her, and her alone; no one else merits the risk.

And then there is the most sinister thought: To say he didn’t see the glimmering opportunity of her shining there amongst the terror and peril of it all may be to give him more credit than he deserves. It has been terribly tidy for him, binding her to his side, conveniently removing everything that might stand between her running into his arms.

But she had done the running. She hates herself more than she can ever hate him, but she hates him, too.

“You selfish  _ coward _ \--”

Through her tears, her wand is there, protruding from its pocket on her clothes pooled obscenely on the floor. She dives beyond him and snatches it up. When she comes back up his hands go back to her shoulders and she lunges into it, pressing the tip of the wand to his throat. It is like watching herself act from afar; the screeching, sobbing thing inside her, freshly woken, is standing there in her body; the rest of her is three paces behind and trying to take control, but the body’s heart is beating too fast, there’s nothing to be done but lash out.

“Give me a reason not to,” she whispers. Her hands shake. His adam’s apple bobs, and she is pressing so hard with her wand that his head tilts back away from her.

He searches her face, and says finally, miserably, hopelessly, hands still warm on her shoulders. “I love you.”

She chokes on the words. “Not enough.”

He lets her go, then, letting his hands drop his his sides and away from her shoulders and he takes a step back. In instant, the world is colder, and she hates herself even more for noticing it, for even now desiring that warmth, that contact. His voice is flat, cruel, empty. “I’m the only chance you’ve got to win this war.”

He’s right. Lily wants so badly to tear at him, to ruin him as she has been, but he’s right, and she can’t. She catches up with herself, finally, and drops her wand to the floor, sagging against the wall, her face in her hands.

Breath comes back to Lily slowly, in fits and starts, but it does come back. So does the rest of her, the cold, iron self that she has become clamping down onto the frenzied mess of woman from years ago. She isn't going to crumple to the floor. It was a near thing, but she isn't going to fall completely to pieces. It's the only blessing.

He is still standing there before her, just watching. That feels like the worst violation.

“I’m sorry,” he breathes.

She spits, “Shut up. Shut up.”

“I’m  _ sorry-- _ ”

“I don’t care.”

She levers herself away from the wall and stands, swaying, looking at the man who claims to love her, the man who has ruined her, with loathing suffusing every part of her face. She doesn’t bother to hide it. She scrubs at her mouth and nose with her hand, as if to clean them of everything, of his stain that he must have left--everywhere his mouth has been is tainted, foul. For years she has been called mudblood, but for the first time, she feels as if the filth is rising from within her, from her blood. From her traitor heart.

She can’t meet his eyes. “There’s work to be done.”


	33. The Dead

The alley outside of Grimmauld Place that evening doesn't smell any better than it did before, but Lily is at least prepared for it this time, under James' cloak. Regulus opens the door himself.

"It's me. I need to talk to Sirius."

Regulus' face makes a comical little  _ o _ but he looks up the street and down, fretfully, before moving aside to let her in. He shows her upstairs and she follows while he natters about what could have  _ possibly _ and  _ most  _ irregular and does  _ Severus _ know and Lily ignores him. 

She's spent all day locked up in the kitchen, alternately crying and breaking crockery and fixing crockery so she could break it again. She couldn't stand to even take the chance of looking Severus in the face after leaving his bedroom so, when she finally braved the rest of the house at dusk, she'd fled here. To see her old friend, and the best man at her wedding.

Sirius is upstairs, dogshaped, sleeping in front of a fire. Lily pushes past Regulus, taking off her cloak and letting it drop to the floor behind her, and then sits crosslegged next to the dog. She buries her face in the shaggy fur at the back of his neck. He raises his head and whines--a question--and, muffled, Lily says, "In a minute. I just want to pet a dog right now."

"Is that why you're here?" Regulus asks. "Or is there--are we in danger?"

Sirius knows better; he lifts his head to glare at Regulus until he wilts, and then pushes his nose back under Lily's hands and waits.

When her face comes up her eyes are red, a little swollen--have been all day--but her face is dry. "Remember that time when I got so sick and James couldn't get Harry to stop crying and the only thing that worked was putting you as a dog in his crib?"

Regulus gasps. He's cottoned on.

The dog starts beneath her hand, and the shifts, sliding back to the man who can respond. "Yes," he says slowly. "Do you?"

"It happened this morning." Or some time last night, but that's too terrible to contemplate. "It's--everything. I've got everything now."

"You can't be serious," Regulus says, his voice pitching up.

"Are you all right? What  _ happened?" _

She shakes her head. It doesn't bear inspection. A version of the truth will have to serve. "I woke up. I just woke up."

Regulus' hands fret. "Has Severus inspected you to ensure there are no lasting effects?"

She ignores him again and Sirius looks over balefully, stopping barely short of a verbal scolding.

Regulus doesn't relent. "He  _ should. _ Severus is an able healer and there is no telling what this could mean. Have you even told him? Does he know?"

Lily says acidly, "I'd say he knows."

And Sirius, bless him, laughs and folds her into his arms like the old friend he is. "It's good to have you back, Lily," he says, smiling into her hair. "I hope you gave old Snivellus what-for."

"Don't call him that," she says reflexively, the habit of years.

"I'll call him anything you like if you come stay with us," Sirius says. "Being around him can't be good for the head, not with all the new stuff swimming around in it."

Regulus has gone from offended to horrified. "Absolutely not."

"My house, Reggie, I'm the heir."   
  


"You were completely disowned eight years ago and you are  _ legally deceased. _ "

"I'm the heir when it suits me. Kreacher!" The muttering, ancient little elf appears, grumbling loudly about the call, and Sirius cuts across him. "Two pours of the twenty year for us, yeah? And keep our glasses full. We're hosting a wake."

And so it comes to pass the Lily and Sirius sip a truly superlative spirit before a fire while a sober and visibly twitchy Regulus sulks with a book in the shadows of an armchair, waiting for signs of instability in their guest. The only thing he catches are the occasional verbal barb from Sirius or, increasingly, Lily, who is meaner at Regulus' periodic interruptions. And stories, of course, all the stories about James they can come up with, even the boring banal ones.

"Do you remember that little broom you got Harry," Lily says, head on Sirius' leg. "It horrified the cat. Whatever happened to my cat?"

"Probably ran off. He was always smart, little ginger thing."

"Little? He never sat on your chest. He was twenty pounds if he was an ounce, and none of it fluff." She swirls the glass in her hand absently. "He's probably still out there, terrorizing rats and squirrels. He ate  _ rats, _ Sirius, not mice, full grown big nasty sewer rats, and he would take them by the nape of the neck to the bathtub so there was no mess, just--blood and a head and a tidy little pile of feet. The most considerate murderer I've ever met."

Sirius makes a laughing noise of disgust. "That's disgusting, is what that is. Didn't he try to eat Peter?"

"Wish he'd finished the job." The image of Peter's human head and feet in the bathtub is horrible but strangely satisfying. She dispels it with a wave. "James and he never got on until he saw him turn into the stag, you know. And then he just--" Lily pantomimes a hop with her hand. "Rode him around the kitchen for a few minutes. Told me about it like he was ashamed to admit they'd come to a détente."

"Told  _ me _ it was the most undignified thing he'd ever done."

"This, from a man who  _ willingly _ eats grass when he doesn't need to!" Lily slaps the knee under her head.

"Didn't say it made sense. Apparently it was worth it to get the damn cat on his side."

"Why?"

"Because they both love you. So they had to get along, because they had to share." Sirius shrugs. "But you're distracting from the point. That broom was the best gift Harry ever got. Cat terror or no."

"God, that broom really set James off on some kind of Quiddich craze. Started trying to run Harry through drills in the house, which broke all sorts of things, of course, but Harry would make a left turn and James would say  _ he'll be a Chaser for certain! _ If I never had to hear  _ that _ ever again it'll be--" Lily brings herself up short, clapping her hand over her mouth.

Which leaves a ringing kind of silence. Because, of course, she never will hear it again. James will never say anything to her ever again. James does not  _ love _ her, he  _ loved. _ Harry will never take a left turn on a broom or be a Chaser or be anything at all.

Harry  _ isn't _ , anymore.

"I'm sorry," she whispers finally, pulling her head off his leg and sitting up.

Sirius says nothing, just stares into the fire, a complicated and raw kind of sadness in his face. 

"I wish Remus here," she says, looking away from him.

"I do too," Sirius says quietly.

Lily stares into her glass and drains it, pitching her voice low enough that Regulus won't be able to hear it. "I knew about you two, you know. Before we even left Hogwarts."

Sirius' eyes are sharp. "Did you now."

"You weren't very subtle." The house-elf fills her glass again for the fourth time, two fingers deep. She really shouldn't, it's going straight to her head, but she doesn't want to feel the things this conversation is bringing up--or she wants to feel only half of them, only the joy, not the pain.

"What are you muttering about," Regulus calls from his seat, sounding petulant.

"How you can't mind your own business," Lily snaps.

"Oh, Reg knows." Sirius waits until his glass is full, too. "Never done anything subtly in my life."

"Never," she agrees. "Why didn't Remus come back with us? I let you handle it but I wondered."

Sirius' face twists into a childish scowl. "Duty, of course. Moony's been like that. Loyalty, duty. Dumbledore gift-wrapped him for Flamel."

"I've got something for you, actually. A sheet, to let you talk to him." Has it really only been two days since she returned from Albania? It feels like a lifetime. "I suppose we should all debrief about all that soon, and the other thing--we got the diadem, in Hogwarts--"

"You  _ what _ ," Regulus squawks, and that's the end of thoughtful recollection.

The next hour is a woozy and ranging debrief ("a  _ month, _ Lily, that's not enough time"--"a basilisk? and you can  _ talk _ to it? there are only three other recorded parselmouths this century and at least one is likely a fraud"--"what else can you remember from the room?"--"it  _ ate _ him?") and Lily doesn't stop drinking from the constantly-refilled glass throughout.

They're horrified, of course, that she hasn’t led with the debrief, and they want to know why, and she manages to play it off--the memories are overwhelming. And they are. But the other thing, the thing she can't even think of and certainly can't talk about, the memory that both fills her with revulsion and self loathing but also sends a tingling heat through her body--that has been at the fore, overshadowing all. She isn’t here about the damn war; she’s here so she doesn’t have to look at Severus’ face.

Her story ends at the door of the house and no one asks where she spent the night or if Severus had healed her, as he plainly had. Small blessings. Regulus just says, "And then your memories returned."

"I had got most of them back already. This was the last of it, the focus of the spell."

He's pacing, chewing on a fingernail furiously. Finally he removes the fingertip from his mouth and says, "Are you  _ sure _ you're muggle-born?"

Lily glares from beneath her lashes, and suggests an embarrassing place to stuff that idea and an exceeding painful way to do it.

Regulus flushes but brushes away the suggestion with a flick of his fingertips. "Being a parselmouth a hereditary trait! What do you think blood supremacy is about?"

"Murdering people like me and my parents and my husband and my son, in my experience," she snarls, face flushing to match his.

"And can your filthy muggle parents speak to snakes, then? Can your sister?" Regulus snaps, growing shrill with offense. "You've no idea--"

She's drunk, swaying on her feet, hefting her heavy glass tumbler in her hand like she might throw it at his head, but angry enough to be precise with her words. "Why are you even  _ here _ if that's what you honestly believe?" Sirius is on his feet, hand over hers, saying her name, but she shakes him off. "Why put up with me, why work with Sirius, why not turn us over to  _ him _ and take your heaps of reward for taking our heads?"

Regulus opens and shuts his mouth, and then says, "Sirius saved my life."

"So what?"

"Excuse me?"

She rounds the table, stumbling closer, less sure on her feet than she had been. "You heard me. Who cares? If you don't think I'm really a  _ person _ , why would I matter? I'm not Sirius. Obliviate me again, Imperio me, kill me and turn me over."

"Lily," Sirius says, cajoling. "Don't go at him like this."

“How dare you even imply,” Regulus is muttering.

Lily wrenches her arm free of Sirius’ grasp and flings the glass. It goes wide, goes to shatter on the wall, but it silences both of them.

“Tell me why, Regulus.”

Regulus looks at the ceiling, then at the floor, then at her hands. "He lied to us," he says thinly. "He hurt Kreacher."

Lily's out of patience. "You're weak," she spits. "You're a child, and you're weak, and you stumbled into a war you don't really want to fight that you're stuck in, and I don't want to hear another god-damn word out of you about my blood or who I am or what I can and can't do, or I swear I won’t miss next time." And then she snatches up the bottle, takes a slug straight from the neck of it, and sits heavily back on the carpet before the fire.

Regulus stands there as if the glass really had struck him.

"Go on, Reg," Sirius says gently. "I'll talk her down."

When he’s gone, Lily turns one glassy eye on Sirius. "I'll throw this bottle through your head too. Don't think I won't."

"Didn't think I'd see the day I was talking  _ you _ down," Sirius says jovially, plucking the bottle from her grip so he can refill his own glass. "There's two horcruxes left, Lily. Just two. We can do this."

"In a month," she says, voice wobbling. It's not a question but for the uncertainty around the edges. She takes the bottle back and shoots back more.

And isn't this what Sirius is best at: this brash, bragging, reassuring confidence. "Easy. You did another without even telling us, and Reg--well, once you and I sober up he'll tell you himself, but he's got enough to move on another. Which only leaves the last a mystery."

"The last one, is it-- did make with Harry's death?" Lily mumbles. "I don't remember. It was just Severus at the door and then waking up and then-- that was all. I never even saw  _ him _ that night."

Sirius shrugs, even though the twinge of this bald recounting hurts them both. "Snape told Reg as much, when he asked. His Lordliness didn't bring anything in with him, so it must have fit in a pocket."

"Which could mean anything. Could be anything."

"It has to be something, Lily." He puts a hand over hers. "We'll find it. I promise."

"And then what?" she says miserably. She's been drooping since she sat back down, and she finally gives into melting into the floor, shifting to lay on her side. "Then we've got chaos. Kids who are years behind in magical education and will need counseling to help parse their--bloody  _ experiences _ \--bunch of former Death Eaters to capture and prosecute--I don't even  _ know _ what the laws look like anymore."

"We'll make you Minister for Magic," he says gently.

Lily lets out a helpless little sound that could be a laugh or a sob; she's not sure. "Have to take care of  _ him _ first."

Sirius lifts his glass. "To taking care of you-know-who."

Before, Lily might have toasted to the end of a violent regime, or to freedom. But she isn't that kind of woman anymore. "To murdering the man who killed Harry and James," Lily slurs, lifting the bottle to clink the lip of it against his glass. "May his bones rot in an unmarked grave."

The rest of the night disappears down the throat of the bottle.


	34. Care

Lily wakes on the couch to a gray dawn and immediately rushes to the kitchen to vomit into the sink. It's like being turned inside-out. It goes on for a very long time.

When it's finally over and she can catch her breath, a voice speaks from behind her.

"You're a mean drunk," Regulus says peevishly.

Lily spits into the sink and turns on the tap to wash the worst of it down. "I'm mean sober, too," she says, sounding hoarse. She coughs a few times, ready for another salvo, but nothing comes.

He’s clearly been stewing in something, preparing lines to fling at her, and what follows is the opening volley. "You can't just  _ do that _ do him."

To hell with the sober and the early risers. "Do what, exactly?"

"Bring up--you know!  _ Him! _ "

Lily does not want to be having this conversation at all, ever, and she definitely does not want to be having this conversation with Regulus while still hovering over a sink in case she's not done vomiting. But that doesn't mean she'll give him what he wants; she'll go down fighting. "We didn't talk about Tom Riddle even once."

"You know who I mean," Regulus scoffs, coming halfway across the kitchen to her.

"I'm sure I don't," she says, spitting again.

Regulus moves closer and stage-whispers through his teeth like some kind of amateur. "You know.  _ James Potter." _

She replies loudly, louder even than her head can tolerate without pain, but it's worth making a point and ending the conversation. "James? James Potter? My husband and Sirius' best friend?"

"I'm his best friend," he says in a furious whisper.

"Like it matters." She scoops some of the running water into her mouth and spits it back out.

"You don't know how bad it was after Potter died." Regulus' footsteps come one, two closer. His voice goes soft, almost pleading. "He was a wreck for months. I could barely get him to turn back from a dog. He wasn't well. If you take him back to that place he'll be useless--worse than useless."

She scoops water from the tap and splashes her face to stop herself, but the leash is short and growing frayed. As if he has any right to any of it--to tell her what to do with the loss of James, to tell her what she's allowed to say to Sirius. As if the suffering of  _ Sirius _ were even visible from where Lily is standing. "I don't care."

“Don't you understand? Smuggling muggleborns only works if Sirius can help me.”  He’s wringing his hands like an old woman, and  _ god _ , he's pathetic. How have these children playing politics managed to gain so much power when they are all so pathetic? She wonders if she could strangle him and Severus both at the same time, one in each hand. "He is the only reason we haven't been caught, I'm not--I can't do it by myself. Let alone your mad hunt for the horcruxes. We need Sirius and you can't drag him back to that dark place. You can't remind him about-- _ him. _ "

Sipping from her palm and finally swallowing--hoping she can keep it down--she turns to face him but leaves the tap running. "I don't care what you need or how Sirius feels. He  _ should _ feel horrible." Lily certainly does. She feels like it happened yesterday. Like it's still happening, right now, and will go on happening for the rest of her life.

Regulus spreads his hands helplessly. "James Potter isn't the most important person here! Sirius and I are still alive and in danger, as are you and Severus--"

She doesn't even want to hear his name. Lily surges forward and grabs him by the collar of his starched shirt, shoving him bodily into the opposite wall despite a wave of nausea. "Shut up."

Regulus looks wild, confused, terrified, clutching at her wrist but not pulling away--and then his hands drop to his sides, and he draws himself up and hisses, "It's hardly my fault that you are unable to face the truth, and the truth is that James Potter and your son are dead and have been dead for years while you have lived in comfort and luxury in Severus' lap."

"Yes," she whispers in his face, aware of exactly how vile her breath must be inches from his face, trembling grip shaking him. "James is dead, my son is dead, and I'm alive." And it's unforgivable, going on living.

He swallows, adam's apple bobbing as he searches her face. "I love my brother," he hisses, looking distraught. "We help each other. You don't know what it's like, serving the Dark Lord."

Her voice doesn't come out quite as scathing as she means it, weak as it is. "Poor you."

"I had no choice. You think I enjoy being party to this war?"

This time it comes out a bit better, with the malice she means. "Poor you. Have you suffered  _ terribly _ ?"

"Why are you  _ like this," _ he hisses between his teeth. "Can't you see that I'm trying to help you?"

Lily spits, pointedly, this time onto the floor and close to his shoes, if only to keep herself from vomiting again.

The horror on his face is, at least, worth it. "I'm trying to help all of us, and you've been the only thing holding all of this together, I know you have, and I know you-- I know you care for Severus, more than Sirius ever will, more than even I--"

She pulls him up by the collar, dragging him closer to her face and baring her teeth. "Don't you dare tell me who I care for."

"Fine, then." He shakes his head, looking frantic. "Fine, if not for him, then for yourself, or for revenge--but you are the only thing holding this alliance together. You must know that. Sirius and Severus hate each other even as they work together toward the same goals--they each do it for you. I can't do it, I can't hold it together, neither of them listen to me. But you--" Regulus looks up into her face and must find something so terrible there that he looks away. "If this falls apart, he'll find us out and kill us all," he whimpers.

Lily releases him. "I hope he does. I hope he burns this whole country down with everyone trapped inside."

Regulus looks as if she's struck him. "You can't mean that. You'd die with us. You can't possibly think you'd be able to escape."

Lily hasn't given a single thought to escape. That thought is the sun and she is buried under six feet of clay.

Regulus watches the idea of  _ escape _ work its way across her face and be discarded and he narrows his eyes, some measure of concern there--finally, but too late. "What did Severus  _ do _ to you?"

Everything. "Nothing."

Regulus looks horrified, his mouth open, some kind of realization sketching its path across him. "Did he-- We wouldn't have left you there if we thought--"

"I said it's nothing. I can keep him in line." Her hands go to fists and she struggles to keep her breathing slow and deep to keep the nausea at bay, to keep her anger in check. "That's what you want, isn't it? Both Sirius and Severus kept in line and marching forward instead of tearing each other to shreds?" 

"If he's done what I think he's done, you're not safe--"

"Stop trying to be noble. It doesn't suit you," she sneers. "I don't need to be rescued."

"Lily, if you need to escape, you could--" he swallows, the idea galls him, but he manages to eke it out. "You could stay. Sirius would want--"

"Stop." Lily struggles to fight the rising nausea of what Regulus clearly thinks has happened, both dangerously close and impossibly distant from what has actually transpired. She's out of patience, and sympathy galls her more than his anger and frustration and fear ever could. "Stop assuming what I want. Stop assuming what's happened. All I want is to destroy this Dark Lord of yours. To be done with all of this, with all of  _ you _ ."

He's wringing his hands again. "It's plain as day that isn't--"

"Shut up." She cuts across him. "Give me what you've got on the next horcrux. I know you have it."

"Lily--"

"Give it to me before I break your nose."

It takes a moment of hangdog silence broken only but the soft rush of water as it flows down the sink for Regulus’ visible concern to melt back to fear. The door swings before him, and Lily is left in peace to clear her mind as best she can. To stuff it all down underneath ice, to try to master herself, to banish all the ghosts. Falling apart serves nothing; that is the only thing she’s sure of.

When Regulus returns, there's a sound of papers on the counter next to her. "There," he says bitterly. He glances up at her, and then back to the papers. "I still don't have the faintest idea about the last."

"Better get cracking, then." She spits one last time into the sink.

He goes to move away from her and then hesitates. "It wasn't a matter of--force? Between you two?"

He's figured it out. Of course he has. He isn't stupid. Lily's head gives another miserable throb and Lily doesn't have the wherewithal to conjure up a lie fast enough; even this prolonged silence staring down the sink drain is an admission. She lets it hang there and then mutters, "If you tell Sirius I'll kill you and make it look like a mistake."

Regulus opens his mouth, and then closes it again. "Promise me you will keep things under control," Regulus pleads. "They both-- this doesn't work at all if you can't control both of them. If your relationship with Severus has changed--"

"Stop."

He does, but then one white fist clenched in fear enters her field of vision, atop the packet of papers. "Promise me," he begs. "That you can still fight this war. Promise me you can end this and keep them from each other's throats."

Fighting this war is the only thing Lily can still do, but she doesn't want to give him the satisfaction. Let him suffer in ignorance. "I'm not promising anything to anyone."

But she does leave. She does, at least, give him that, taking the papers and walking out the door under the invisibility cloak into the gray and cool dawn that heralds spring.

Apparition is uncomfortable even when she is hale and Lily is decidedly  _ not.  _ She wobbles her way up the front steps of the home she has shared with Severus retching.

The lab is where the pain-relieving draught is and of course Severus is there, working away. She relegates him to the periphery of her eyesight, to the edges, where he is nothing but a black smudge--how she prefers him right now, as a nothingness, an absence, the way he was when she was married to James. It's a polite fiction she can continue, if she wants it, and she does. The dose goes down while she gives him just her palm to forestall anything he has to say.

But he can't be put off forever and the black smudge of him has turned, likely crossing its arms, and is facing her, waiting. She moves to the sink, nearer to him, and sips water from the faucet, glancing past him.

The way Severus wrinkles his nose at her tells her that she smells like the floor of a particularly disreputable bar, which makes sense as it’s precisely how she feels. Her stomach gives a heave and she puts both hands on the bench top to stabilize herself, but there's nothing that could possibly come up other than maybe the ghosts of a dozen cigarettes.

_ Cigarettes. _ Christ. Why did Sirius even have them, let alone give them to her? An occasional  _ treat _ ? They were French and they were horrible and she'd still smoked more than half a pack of them. 

When her stomach is stable enough to speak, she says, "My body's already putting me through enough hell, so save whatever you were going to say."

He looks disdainful from under his brows. "It'd be faster to poison yourself. I have a selection."

"Ethanol is a poison, so technically I did."

He's ignoring her, gone back to work. "I hope you don't intend to make a habit of this."

"Why do you care?" she snaps. "I'll do as I please."

Disdain solidifies. "I'm glad to see you're finished playing at chessmaster."

She doesn't have the wherewithal to tell him where to stuff that idea. "I'm not. I'm just suffering." She drops the packet Regulus handed over onto the bench next to her. "The next horcrux. Little Hangleton."

He glances, then goes back to work, impassive. Not particularly inclined to take orders, then.

Now that she's glanced past his face she can't seem to stop watching him. Nothing's changed except where she's standing, what light she's seeing him in now, the orientation of her heart. Nothing's changed except everything. And he knew, he knew the whole time, all of it--knew what she would feel,  _ knew _ this would happen if her memories returned in full.

But of course, which of them had said Harry and James were gone for good--had stood there, had touched him, had said  _ please _ like an obedient pet.

And then she had gotten exactly what she had asked for. Nothing more or less. 

There's a slip of skin, below his jaw, showing between the lock of hair tucked behind his ear and the hair dangling in his face, and there's half of a reddened crescent there, a shape made by her own teeth. 

It's not  _ nothing _ to her--he isn’t  _ nothing _ to her--and Lily wants to scream.

There's no room for it, for--whatever this is, whatever this feeling is, still. She wants to bite him again,  _ harder _ , wants to rip his throat out, wants to flay the flesh from his bones for the audacity of still meaning something to her in the face of all this overwhelming grief and guilt. She grits her teeth against it, hands making fists in her cloak.

His gaze flicks over, and she can feel his eyes watching her, calculating, measuring. 

"You'd love that, wouldn't you. For me to drink poison. To be rid of me," she says. "Easier that way."

He scowls but the heat of his gaze finally turns from her, back to his work, and his voice is bitter and flat. "I do not wish to get rid of you."

  
It's downright romantic, coming from him, and disgusting for it. "I don't care what you want," she spits, with more vitriol than she ever had for Regulus. She tears the Dreamless Sleep from the cabinet and storms out, muttering it over and over:  _ I don't care I don't care I don't care. _ As if by repetition she could make it true.


	35. Home

Lily is tied to an anchor. The anchor is the full knowledge and understanding of what she has lost. Every thought is towed under by it:  _ I should eat something, but Harry and James are dead. This potion recipe isn't quite right, Harry and James are dead, I will need to add more beetle wing next time. Harry and James are dead and I wonder when they will come to kill me too for what I've stolen, for what I've tried to do. I wonder if it will even hurt with them dead. _

This is the shape of the anchor she is tied to. Guilt is the ocean drowning her.

Sleep no longer comes easy, even with Dreamless Sleep, and the day is too long spent dozing in bed. Nightmares chase her--horrible violent images full of strange faces and fury and death, and that green light that stole her family. By the time the sun dips below the horizon, Lily can’t stand lying in bed anymore. She tries to drink her tea the way she used to take it--heavily sugared--and retches. It tastes too much like home, how James used to fix it for her. How much of it she drank when she was pregnant, and how morning sickness stole that pleasure from her.

And after they were gone, cup after cup of tea the way she used to like it as a child, the only way Severus knew how to make it, still repulsive with the sickness born of loss. Until she couldn't get out of bed. Until he came to her pleading. Until he said,  _ I can help you. Let me help you. I'll do anything. _

_ I can take it, Lily. Let me take this. Not from you. For you. _

And she let him. She let him take them. He had stupefied her the first time, when he came to steal her before the Dark Lord came, knocked her out of the fight before she even knew what was happening, but this was different. This she allowed to happen. She let them be taken from her, locked away. She had consented to all of it, and then consented to let him touch her.

He had sat at her bedside looking so scared, so desperate, and she had taken his hand and said  _ do it before I lose my nerve or my mind. _ He had held her hand so tightly it hurt, so tightly her wedding band had dug into her fingers, and then he had done as she asked. And then he had slipped the rings from her finger to complete the trick.

A memory charm removing anything as significant as a husband and child is bound to leave marks. If he had replaced it with something else--turned her into another person, given her an entirely new past--it might have been easier on her body, on her mind, easier in every way.

But Severus is selfish. He always has been. He couldn't remake her into a new woman and set her free to be subject to the world he had helped to make. As it was, it took more than two years of sleep-hazed time to recover. She would be talking to him, and then the floor would open up beneath her and her vision would go fuzzy and wreathed with darkness, and she would come to with a cup of cold tea before her, a concerned Severus across table.  _ Helping. _

Yes, of course. Helping. That's what he had done. And they had fallen into the routine; him, bringing her things from the outside world, gifts, books, amusements as you might bring to a child convalescing from a long and terrible fever. Company as one might give a true friend or a treasured lover. She could almost see it through his eyes: the extraordinary care he must have lavished upon his sickly ward, his poor little maid--a man of such impatience waiting across the table for her to come back to him. The loaned house-elf who had cooked their meals for the first year until she could manage it. What a victory that had become; cooking their meals, replacing the little creature, expanding her domain to the whole house instead of the spare little sickroom at the end of the long hallway tucked away on the third floor.

The service he asked for then, when it was unavoidable; the service he explained so carefully it almost didn’t seem like she was a prisoner or a slave. It had taken her dazed and sick months to even notice the absence of her wand; further months to suspect he wasn’t going to give it back to her; this revelation only sealed it.

More than anything else, Lily hated how easy it was to give up her wand when she had the promise of his protection during the intervening years--years she spent sitting at a window, watching seasons move across the landscape like massaging fingers, waiting for the return of the thing that filled the empty space she could see but never touch.

Lily picks through all the memories she has now, and can’t find a single thing that forgives Severus.

Lily can’t find a single thing to forgive herself, either. But she doesn’t particularly want to. When the sun is down, she gives up on rest, gives up on ever feeling better, and decides to set to work.

That’s how Severus finds her in the library. Lily flicks a page to the book, refusing to look up. It struggles, trembling in her grip. The door clicks shut, and the sharp noise of his bootheels approaches her table.

She lays the spine of the book to the desk. “What do you want.”

His jaw works. “You are in my library.”

“So I am.” She goes back to the book. He just keeps standing there with that hangdog expression on his long and sallow face, as if he just waits long enough she’ll give in. Well, she thinks bitterly, it’s worked before. All he had to do was wait long enough and she  _ did _ give in, like some sort of stupid teenager, as if it were the only logical way to express gratitude or companionship or--

Lily will not even think the next thing it could be.

“I am sorry,” he says stiffly, “if what happened--”

“Shut it,” she snaps. “I don’t have the time for your rehearsed apologies and I don’t care to hear them.”

Severus looks taken entirely aback. He fumbles for words. “I wished--”

“You wanted to see if I’m ready to be Obliviated again?” She shakes her head. The notes at her side catch her vengeance as she jots a line, and then another, carving the parchment with the end of the quill. The satisfaction of the violence is enough to keep her going.

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

It comes out in a tumble. “I wanted to be sure you were still alive.”

“Still?”

“A lesson from the last time you had these memories.”

But Lily knows it already, has picked it over: the desire to _ leave _ , to go through the door and disappear, to follow James and Harry where they had gone. If she had done it then, she thinks, if she had succeeded, she could have caught up with them. She could have followed the same path, if not by Voldemort's hand, then her own. 

But she is different now. She knows that. If she went down that path, she would end up lost, completely lost and alone. And it would serve no purpose, move the war no closer to won, bring no one back, keep no one from harm. At least here there is comfort, the cold, hard hatred and fury driving her forward with Severus bobbing along like towed boat with a lost rudder. “Then let me assure you that there won’t be any of that. There’s no point in it.”

“I wish to--”

“Don’t.”

He stands there for a moment, swaying. “If there is anything I can do for you, I will do it.”

She lifts the book in her hands. “Bindings.”

He opens his mouth, and then shuts it. “What?”

It'd be funny if she liked him, just now. As it stands, she wants to hit him for failing to keep up. She takes care to enunciate the repetition clearly. "Bindings. What, you expected me to ask about Inferi? More constructs, this time made of the blood of my child and husband?"

He swallows. He had, of course, so he spits out the prepared response. “You would not want whatever those methods produce. Your child would rot apart in your hands.”

Her calm is paper-thin, but it holds. "I'm not stupid. I've read enough about the requirements. I know better than to ask for that."

Face going paler even than its usual color, he asks, "Whom are you looking to bind?"

She stabs another note into the parchment before replying. "How many Marked Death Eaters are there?"

Severus blinks once. She can still surprise him. Eventually he sinks into a chair across from her.  Never could resist a puzzle. His voice, when it finally comes, is soft, silky, clean of inflection, utterly Occluded. "At least thirty I know the names of. More whom I do not. Many more. The army has grown."

"You remember what I said? Destroy all magic? That doesn't look possible. But I have another." She looks at his hands, folded before him, and reaches the feathered end of the quill across to stroke, oh-so-gently, against the sleeve covering his left forearm. "If I can, I'm going to burn the magic--maybe even the life--right out of everyone connected to  _ that. _ Gut his army and give him a bunch of squibs. Give a consequence for taking the thing."

He doesn't gasp, doesn't faint, doesn't do anything but go so still that he can't be breathing. And then he blinks, and his shoulders move, but he doesn't draw away or scream. He's stuffed it all down beneath the ocean, under the impenetrable ice of Occlumency. All that's left in his eyes is calculation as they flicker back and forth on invisible figures on the desk between them.

"It could be done," he says finally. "The connection is a binding in itself, tied directly into each Death Eater. It will be easier to manipulate an extant binding than to create a new one." He looks up at her, eyes flat and opaque. "It will take my own magic with it, I imagine. Perhaps my life, if you are successful."

"And Regulus' as well." Acceptable sacrifices.

"He will never agree to it."

"Will you?"

He goes perfectly still again, and his pale lips barely move. "Do not insult me."

"It could kill you. It could kill all of them. Could pull your very souls out with the magic."

"Unlikely."

"That wouldn't be worse?"

He hasn't broken her gaze for an instant and he does not now. It's brave, it's him showing her that he can be brave. "I presume there is no way to convince you of another path."

"None."

"Then you give me no choice at all."

She puts down the quill, shuts the book. "Don't be stupid. I want you to--how did you put it?  _ Live with it. _ "

And how strange that  _ this _ demand--out of all of them--makes him stand, pulls at his mouth. It's all frozen beneath a glacier but something is burning at the core, something unpleasant wriggling its way out.

"Who would have thought," he says, with deliberate and slow cruelty. "Precious, beautiful, beloved Lily Potter--mother, wife, member of the Order of the Phoenix, unfortunate subject of the Dark Lord's empire--now trying to rival the Dark Lord himself?" He lets out a sound that could have passed for a mocking laugh in another life; here, it is robbed utterly of meaning as a laugh at all. It is merely a sound, violent and brittle.

She can feel her cool shredding like so much parchment in his hands. "Don't you dare--"

He cuts across her, rising to pace. "The request that I preserve my own life is a particularly eloquent touch. Worthy of the Dark Lord himself. Make no mistake, your plans are as Dark as they come, just as Dark as his." He places both hands on the desk, knuckles white. "You will need power to accomplish this--resources that are vanishingly rare--training in the Dark Arts and the Dark Lord's own specialized spells that you do not possess--in short,  _ me. _ "

"I could do it alone," she snarls, coming to her feet as well.

"You could not," he says, a grim finality in his tone. "Even Regulus wouldn't be able to do it, and you know the other Black brother would never approve. The books you have read are nothing but a shadow of real-life practice. Without guidance from an experienced caster, you would come to a messy end within the week."

"You just want me to need you. I  _ don't. _ "

"Despite your insistence on running headlong at the most dangerous thing in your sight, Lily, I intend to work toward your survival of this war."

It could be a romantic sentiment; instead it comes out grim, fierce, and full of that wretched, unworthy  _ love _ \--

The cup shatters against the wall. The doorframe steams with tea. She doesn’t even remember flinging it, but it’s second best to attacking him. He still has a use, a cold voice from deep in her gut says. "If I think you're going to betray me, I will kill you without hesitation."

He opens his mouth as if about to give voice to a condescending retort, about her weakness, about the precise volume and nature of the  _ nothing _ she is, but nothing comes out. He shuts it again. His face is hard, jaw set.

He believes her. Good.

"You want to be my team of apprentices again, like with the construct? Fine. You're my team of apprentices. Is that what you want?"

"No," he snarls. “It isn’t.”

And isn’t that just the thing, just the clarity she was looking for. The rage grows in her, like cold fire. She splays both hands on the table before her, bracing herself, as if she is ready to vault across it and attack him physically. "Then what do you want?"

For a long minute, he stares at her, his face an ashen mask, his mouth twisted and frozen with anger and something deeper, worse. Severus doesn’t need to say it; that bottomless hunger is written across his features, the desire for that which once was between them, unfettered by the weight of the past.

He looks away first instead of trying to put the raw and pulsing wound of his heartbreak into words. A pity; she’d love to turn it on him, to shred him with it. Still, Lily understands capitulation for the victory it is. 

But victory alone is not enough. She wants  _ vengeance. _ She wants to hold a knife and gut him the same way she's been gutted. And she knows the knife so well.

“You said you loved me,” she says.

He does a very good job of it, she thinks. If she did not know him so well--if they had not spent years and years looking into each other’s faces, years and years being able to read each twitch and subtle movement, every involuntary breath that blows each of their bodies full of life--she might have missed it. But his shoulder hitches along with his breath in his throat, his adam's apple bobs, and she knows that he is very nearly on the edge of screaming at her or hexing her. Years ago, when they were both children, perhaps, he might have. Had everything gone differently, perhaps--if he were truly alone, if he had let her die--he might be an angry enough creature to lash out. 

But he does neither. He is enough of a selfish coward that he saved her rather than leave her fate in the hands of others. So he stands there and takes it, like the bastard he is.

She looks up and meets his burning gaze. In his eyes there is a sublimated hatred, loathing as she has never seen in him before. Good. They understand each other, then. The twist of the knife, then, just to make the lesson stick. "Did you mean it?"

“It does not matter.” He has shut himself away, shrouded himself in layers upon layers of anger and magic, but the answer is there anyway, in his face, his eyes, the thread that stitches together all his impotent rage: yes, yes, yes, of course,  _ yes _ . He can try to draw it over himself but she can see the seams, now. She knows the string that holds him together. She knows how to tie a noose from it.

“It does matter, Severus.” She skims a hand over the papers before her, pressing her fingertips down until her knuckles blanch white, trying to fix it all in space, to pin it to the desk. Yes, Regulus, she thinks. I can do it. He can be controlled. “It means you will do as I say.”


	36. The Potter Estate

Her demands have been simple, straightforward, a bulleted list easily written out on parchment:  _ Show me what you’re up to in the Potter estate. Help me investigate Little Hangleton. Help me find the last horcruxes. Help us defeat him. Then get out of what’s left of my life. _ It’s simple when he follows orders, simple when he can be bid, simple to carry on moment by grating, unpleasant moment. It is not easy, but it is simple. Every interaction with Severus is a raw nerve, so she assumes the mien of a general. It clearly chafes but he shows her the obedient cold-eyed soldier he has been quickly enough. He asked for a day to prepare to take her to the Potter estate, the easiest of the list; she gives it because it’s better than clawing his eyes out and will make less of a mess on the carpet.

Lily takes the day to study further on bindings, to make a list of questions for Severus about the nature of the Dark Mark--a neatly printed list being preferable to asking in person--and to master herself, to take all the hate and anger and grief and freeze it out with Occlumency, to whittle herself down into the sharpest possible point, to craft herself into a more effective weapon.

As it turns out, Severus was right. It is much, much easier like this, to pull the sheet of ice over herself and pin it there with the two sparkling little deaths inside her around which all else rotates. An agony can craft its own prison after all. It is simpler to work this way without distraction, without love or lust or feeling. There are certain liabilities; she hasn’t eaten all day, for one. The second her mind catches hold of the idea of hunger it gets sucked under and becomes unimportant. Which, on the whole, feels like a potential issue; oblivion is too greedy. She also sharpened a quill so violently that it shaved a thin swath of skin from the length her index finger, and she hadn’t even noticed until the blood stained the parchment. It isn’t foolproof, either; it requires vigilance and Severus’ face has a way of making her spiral, making all the ice crack. But it is altogether an improvement over the previous two days of violence and drinking and despair, and in the cold light of day Lily accepts it as better than laying abed and weeping. Almost anything would be.

Severus puts her off for most of another day of study before he thrusts a vial of Polyjuice into her hand and says, “Drink. It will last two and a half hours only. That is what I am giving you.”

Easy enough. Trust is mutable and self-preservation is a far-gone thought. She drinks.

The woman she becomes isn’t so different from herself, physically. It’s easier that way when running in disguise--a lesson from her Order days. Lily doesn’t care where she is, though, or who. The hair goes a dull, dun color, thin as paper. Her face shifts in ways she can’t see and doesn't care to. 

“The Potter Estate,” she asks in the stranger’s voice.

“Yes,” he says, and downs his own vial, turning into the gray-bearded man she had very nearly attacked in the entryway so recently.

If the age on Severus’ new face and the sense of her own sagging lower is any indication, she’d place the age of both around fifty. A glance in a window’s reflection confirms it. Much older, then.

“Who am I supposed to be?” she asks.

He can stand to look at her like this, as someone else. “Mariposa Stapleton. Half-blood, colleague, member of the new order. I will make introductions.”

They leave Disillusioned through a servant’s exit through the kitchen, and he grasps her arm and holds it fast so he can, utterly without warning, side-along her with him.

She almost vomits. It’s rude, and cruel, and:  _ fine. _ She’ll pay him back in triplicate.

The Potter Estate was always beautiful, if quite a bit more modest than Malfoy Manor and less corrupted by ancient pureblood residents than Grimmauld Place. The lawns have gone to seed, though; Severus parts a path through the tall grass and ensures that behind them it returns as it was, leaving everything undisturbed.

In the foyer, the disguised Severus gives a series of complex movements, and then another door is revealed to kitchens, where someone too familiar stands, pacing, holding a child.

Frank Longbottom looks up, half a smile frozen on his lips the second he sees Severus is not alone. But it’s just a momentary stiffness; Frank was an Auror before everything went to shit, and a good one. He knows how to play it cool. “Hey, Septimus,” he says. “Wasn’t expecting you.”

“I need to introduce you to my colleague,” says the gravelly voice next to her. “She may be performing duties from now on. Mariposa, this is Frank Longbottom.”

And isn’t  _ that _ an opportunity to twist a knife. “Don’t be so cold, darling.” She seizes Severus’ hand and twines her own around his. “I’m his wife, not colleague. Pleased to meet you, Frank.”

It’s a testament to Severus’ abilities that only Lily can feel the jolt that runs through him where her body is pressed to his side, when his fingers spasm around her own.

Frank nods, though he clearly doesn’t like it. “I’d shake your hand but--” he gestures to the boy. “Neville here’s about to go for his afternoon nap.” Frank refocuses up from his son. “Bringing your wife around, Septimus, is that wise?”

“I doubt it, but she would not be put off,” he says. The stiffness in his voice is a thing well-buried, but Lily can hear it. “Regardless, someone must ensure your safety if I were to become incapacitated.”

“Still,” Frank says. “I don't like it.” He looks to the boy in his arms, face shifting to a softness, an affection Lily must look away from. “All right, Neville, you ready to nap? Daddy has some guests to take care of.”

The boy looks over his father’s shoulder at the two of them and then nods to his father.

“Back in a minute,” Frank says, and disappears out the door through a corridor.

The second the door swings shut, Severus tears his hand from her own and says in an icy whisper, “What are you playing at.”

“If I know you, you’ve told him nothing about this Septimus character. This is a way to establish trust, you absolute idiot.”

“You have no idea what I’m doing here. I have explained nothing.”

She snorts. “You’ve let slip more than you know, and it doesn’t matter. Last I checked, Frank is my friend and a fellow Order member. You’re the Death Eater here, unless you’ve forgotten.” 

The face might not be Severus’, but the look of barely-contained fury is all him. 

Before he can retort, Lily takes his hand again and grins broadly--a dead thing, more a baring of teeth than a true smile--and says, “Now be kind to your wife in front of the guests,  _ darling _ .”

Something behind the borrowed eyes in Severus slams shut like an iron trap, and the stranger’s face is impassive and cold again, his hand loose and dead in her own even as she digs her fingernails into the back of his palm.

Frank returns, rubbing his hands nervously on his thighs. “So, Mariposa,” he says. “Let’s get down to business. What has Septimus here told you?”

“Nothing at all,” she says brightly. “Have you, sweetheart?”

He gives her a fleeting, dark look. “It is safer that way,” he says in a clipped tone to Frank. “The wards around this place are quite secure. Our home, however, is potentially less so.”

“Do you think you’re being watched?” Frank asks sharply. “Do they know?”

“Anything is possible,” Severus says with a sweeping gesture. “But I doubt it. I have been exceedingly careful.”

Frank looks to Lily and then back to Severus, taking a seat at the kitchen table. “How’d you keep it from her, then?”

Lily takes a seat across from Frank and Severus follows suit beside her. She pats the back of his hand, still clenched in her own. “My Septimus has always been a secretive man, though this quite takes the cake. Do tell me, is it just you and the boy, Frank?”

Frankl looks startled. “Merlin, you really haven’t told her anything,” he says, shaking his head. “No, there’s a group of us, we’ve been on the run after Alice--” He swallows. It must still be difficult. Lily’s heart gives a momentary clench of sympathy before it goes frosted with ice. “My wife, Alice, died. Along with Emmeline Vance. We’ve been going from hiding place to hiding place as best we can, picking up some others along the way. But Septimus here found us a few weeks ago--we were about to be discovered by Death Eaters--he hid us for a time, and then brought us here for something longer-term. We’re the last of our cause.”

“And what exactly is your cause?” Lily asks, though she suspects she knows the answer.

Frank looks back up at Severus, who nods imperceptibly. “Have you ever heard of the Order of the Phoenix?”

Lily could almost laugh. She will likely never hear the end of the Order of the Phoenix. “Perhaps, but why don’t you tell me, Frank?”

Frank tenses up before her, and glances at Severus again. All his instincts must be screaming against telling her anything, it’s such a bald incision; but there’s no door, Severus has given her nothing to work with, so her fumbling attempts at spying must be enough.

“Are you sure,” Frank asks him. It’s almost comforting that he isn’t a complete fool, isn’t willing to give everything up right away.

“Would you like me to prove this is my wife? Or her dedication? I believe I can prove both in one,” he says in those silken, Occluded tones he uses on other Death Eaters. He lifts their joined hands to the table and looks her in the eye. His face says,  _ you started this. _ “My love, tell me about your first son. How he died.”

The cruelty of it steals Lily’s breath away, and she could kill him for it. Right now, right here. He cannot do this--not here, not now, not with his hand wrapped firmly around her own and his eyes boring into hers and Frank Longbottom looking on the whole time. She could do it, the hand in her lap is already reaching toward her pocket where her wand is, she could tell Frank everything and stay here, she could be  _ done _ with Severus and bury his corpse in a shallow grave, throw dirt on his face and make it disappear from her life--

Lily breaks her gaze first, looks to the table. Swallows the hailstone of anger and pride forming in her throat. The charade must be kept up if she’s to get what she’s asked for and she intends to get what she’s asked for. She’d paid for it enough.

“My son died,” she says, and her voice has a hoarse sincerity. It’s the truth, all she can tell in this moment. “The Dark Lord murdered him in his cradle. My first husband angered him, you see. And he killed him and my son.”

“I’m sorry,” Frank says, with all the kindness born of a man who has seen and known endless swaths of tragedy. 

The clock on the wall ticks off thirty seconds and Lily sniffs, regaining a little composure, a measure of dignity. “It was a very long time ago.” Lily takes her hand out of Severus’--gently enough for the show--and scrubs at the corners of her eyes with her sleeve, like a child. “I wish you wouldn’t bring that up, you know how it upsets me,” she says. Her voice quavers--not with emotion, but with the repression of it, but it serves all the same.

“You see why I’ve brought her in,” Severus says after a breath, folding his hands before him.

“I suppose I can,” Frank says, and his ease tells them both the ruse has worked.

There will be time to kill Severus later. Looking up, still slightly clouded with repressed tears, Lily asks. “So. Tell me about your ragtag bandits that my husband has saved from certain doom.” 

It turns out--through roundabout deduction--that they had been in hiding but been found out. The last of the Order. Severus himself has asked not to know the remaining identities as a security measure, so she won’t meet them; Frank is the remaining face of the organization. Severus--in the guise of Septimus--merely brings them news, brings them supplies in the abandoned mansion, heals them when they are hurt.

This is the grand sinister plan Sirius had worried at, the secret use of her husband’s family home. Supporting the Order in secret. Providing a base. It’s what James himself would have done, had he been given the opportunity, which is both bitter and true.

When Frank is done explaining, Lily finally asks it--the real question weighing heavy on her mind, beyond everything else. “And when the Dark Lord falls. You will be prepared to make order? A new government? Liberation?”

Frank looks startled. “Merlin, is that--are you working on more than I know about?” He leans close. “Is it--I mean, I had heard there was talk of the Deathly Hallows.”

It takes a second for her to remember, but, yes: Minerva had said, even James had said, it was a story she had read to Harry about the Three Brothers. The Cloak, the Stone, the Wand, the Deathly Hallows, and the legend as it existed for the adults as a quest, as a thing to search for.

God, it’s been a hundred years. “He has the wand.”

Frank nods, knowing. “But if we could find the Stone-- Dumbledore used to search for them. It’s said the Stone could bring someone back from death.” There’s a hungry look in Frank’s eyes that becomes all to familiar. “It’s supposed to be small, black, it’s what we’ve been looking for all this time since Dumbledore died. It’s all he left us.”

“Dumbledore,” Lily lies, mouth dry. “You’d want to bring back Dumbledore with the Stone, to fight?”

It’s clear he doesn’t. The face of the person he’d bring back is just as clear as the face of her own choice, were it possible.

“Yes,” Frank lies.

It’s hard to disappoint him, but she must. Lily cuts a glance sideway to Severus, but he gives her nothing. This is hers to divulge or not; she’s made it clear this is her war, now. “There are--rumors of another way to defeat him.” She shrugs a shoulder. “If nothing else, he is a man. He must die someday.” An old woman’s lie, but it suits.

Lily watches the hope go out in Frank’s eyes. He bends his head, rubs the back of his neck. “I don’t know. We’ve been focused on lesser things. Survival, mostly, Septimus here can’t get away that often and between us we don’t have much--too few wands, too many children.” Frank runs a hand through his hair. “We’re refugees, not an army. I had hoped--”

“I know someone,” Lily interjects, suddenly possessed of a thought and a need to expel it. “Perenelle Flamel. In Paris. Can you send messages? And her husband Nicolas, he’s further away. I can’t tell you where, but there is a colony of British men and women in exile, in hiding, they will need to be repatriated once the war is won--”

“The war?” Frank asks. “Mariposa, are you saying--”

“Don’t ask me questions I can’t answer, Frank,” Lily says. “If there were a covert war we certainly couldn’t risk it by telling you.”

“If there were, of course.” He nods, understanding. “I take it you’ve worked for Dumbledore. That’s one of his tactics.” And then he puts two and two together. “Nicolas Flamel?”

She grins, and for once it’s sincere that he’s cottoned on, even with a stranger’s mouth it feels good. “Nicolas Flamel. A potential escape route, should you need it, and a potential ally if things go well. If the Dark Lord falls.”

Out spills everything about the werewolf colony short of their location. She promises half the parchment--Sirius will have to share and Nicolas will have to accept it. And Sirius will have to be told as well, should anything happen to herself or the black cloud listening but saying nothing beside her. Through Nicolas, they can reach Perenelle and work together rather than separately. And with Sirius and Regulus’ muggleborn smuggling, they’ve got contacts as well, sympathetic ones that could help them flee the country. Or return to it.

Separately, they are refugees, cowering in hiding. Together, they may be an army, a new government. Frank has crossed paths with exiled Ministry workers who could rebuild the thing brick by brick--people Regulus or Sirius or even Severus could reach out to, could work with. Severus himself even chimes in periodically with information: who can be trusted, who cannot, who could potentially be persuaded. It’s almost civil with their cover, with Frank there to perform for, with the work of listing allies, locations, powers, places, people--a plan for the eventual downfall of the Dark Lord, a plan to retake the country from the remaining Death Eaters once Tom Riddle is gone. Slowly but surely, it begins to look like a network that could bring them to heel.

There’s something almost buoyant, lifting her, that there are others who can and will fight--that the world is not entirely lost, that recovery is possible. It’s almost like hope.

The time left on the Polyjuice dwindles rapidly. After two hours, the sun is setting, and little Neville wanders back in draped in a blanket. Frank scoops him into his lap with practiced ease. The boy leans up, cupping his hand around his mouth to whisper into his father’s ear, and Frank smiles.

The balloon of hope pops and the rest of her mind goes cold and blank, because it must, because this is what is required of her, because the alternative is a red-limned screaming thing. “Look at the time. We’ll be missed, Septimus. We should take our leave. We’ve stolen enough of your day.”

“I certainly have enough to be getting on with,” Frank says. “And Neville’s just told me he’s hungry. Let me just see the guests off, Neville.” 

He puts the boy back on the floor so he can come to his feet. Neville meets Lily’s eyes and she realizes she’s staring. She breaks the gaze before Frank can notice.

“If I didn’t know better, Mariposa,” Frank says, extending a hand, “I’d say you were in the Order yourself.”

“If you didn’t know better,” Lily says, taking his hand and shaking it. “But you do.”

“Best not get to guessing anyway,” says Frank,  “I’m sure Septimus here would have a fit.”

“He would,” she says. “We’ll be in touch, Frank, but this is--this is more than I had even hoped was possible. And if something happens, if the Dark Lord falls--”

Frank nods, and shakes Severus’ hand. “We’ll be ready to move on the targets we discussed. The Ministry, the Floo Network, Azkaban.”

Severus interjects. “McGonagall should be your main target, but if you can disable the Dementors--”

Frank holds up a palm. “I know. I’ll tell everyone else, get us sparring. And if you can get wands--”

“We can,” Severus says. Lily twines her arm around Severus’ again, putting on the show but the message clear:  _ I will hold you to it _ . His palm in hers twitches. “I will ensure it.”

The side-along on the return trip is just as brutal, and the servant’s entrance leads them straight into the kitchens. Once the door's shut, he tears his hand from hers as if she's burned him. The unfamiliar hand with the familiar wand trembles slightly as he turns toward the door, casts a few wards, and then turns back. "How  _ dare _ you."

"How dare I? How dare  _ you.  _ I should have killed you then and there. If you ever so much as  _ think _ to use my son’s death as a weapon against me--"

“You could have completed it and killed them all as well,” he sneers. "They are in hiding. You have killed them all by giving them that rubbish. As if a pack of werewolves and a woman in Paris you’ve never met can possibly make the difference."

“If you bring up Harry ever again, I won’t be so kind.” Her wand’s in her hand, an open threat.

“Was that  _ kindness? _ It looked rather like making me suffer.”

She’s spitting mad, furious, fingers white on her wand. “You deserve it.”

"I have done this for you--all of it! For you!" The polyjuice is wearing off, barely; his eyes burn the whole way through her as they change back from the hazel to the familiar raging black, and Lily can feel her own face returning to its customary shape as well. “Is this not what you would have wanted?”

"And that's why you hid it from me, is that it?"

"If you were captured, interrogated, all of their lives would be forfeit. Even knowing Longbottom’s face and location is too much for either of us. You'd prefer your self-righteousness to their safety?"

"I don't trust you," she says, biting off each word with fresh savagery. "I’m through trusting you with  _ anything _ that matters."

"Yes, I suppose you must’ve learned that lesson from Pettigrew. Pity it taught you the wrong thing.”

He parries the first hex she flings and the second. It takes the third--a particularly nasty curse--for him to fire back, but he does, though he loses ground doing it. He darts through the kitchen door and she follows at a dead sprint, flinging hexes wildly. He flies--that trick learned at Tom Riddle’s knee again--to the banister and disappears up the hall, past the lab.

She roars a futile curse; Lily can’t fly. The distance between them lengthens as she pelts up the stairs. She wants to hurt him and he’s running away like a coward. It’s unforgivable.

When Lily gets to the top of the stairs, breathless, she blasts open all the doors: empty, empty, empty, and she screams his name, curses it, calls him what he is: a coward, a cheat, a monster.

There is a single footfall overhead. No hesitation: she pelts up the stairs to the third floor, where he’ll be trapped, then she’ll be able to hit him and hit him and  _ hit him _ until something is fixed.

The construct is cowering in a place she once called her room--the door is open. The closet is empty. Leaving only his bedroom. She strides in--

The Disarming charm hits her square and she curses again, snatching after the wand as it flies from her hand to his, but it’s too late. He’s got it and she’s stopped, a few feet from him.

“There, is this what you want?” he snarls, and he throws something at her feet.

Two glittering rings. A gold wedding band, and a diamond the size of the nail on her pinky finger, something James got down on one knee and stuttered over because he  _ knew _ it was too big,  _ knew _ it was absurd, but it had been in the family for a terribly long time and--

In the memory, snow pours out of James’ mouth instead of words, and then it all goes under glass. 

Lily sees red. This is the line, and he’s crossed it, utterly--she has known he was cruel, had known it even  _ before _ , but this--

She charges him, and it becomes a physical brawl.

She’s surprised him so much she is able to knock both wands from his hand and rolling across the room, under the bed, away from both of them. She bowls him over in a tangle of limbs on the floor but he is longer, taller, able to push and gain the upper hand once they hit the carpet. He holds one of her wrists to the floor, his mouth twisted in a vicious snarl, but the other hand escapes his grasp and her fist connects with his teeth, once, twice, three times. Blood blooms on his lip, down his chin--her knuckles are sliced open on his teeth--but he's so stunned by the pain that his grip loosens for a moment, and with both hands she wrenches him violently, rolling over him to straddle his waist.

Both her hands go to his throat and  _ squeeze _ .

He's still snarling, not giving an inch, hands tearing at her hair, circling her neck, too--but he doesn't have it in him to really do it, to really hurt her. His hands are a toothless and idle threat, thumbs clutching spasmodically at her collarbone while she bears down on his windpipe. In that moment, she thinks she can do it, can kill him for what he’s done.

\--This is the most they'd touched each other since that night, since  _ before _ . And her hands loosen, fractionally, thinking of it. Lily is panting and victorious and suddenly blazing hot, and the blood painting his mouth crimson, blood she put there--equal measure beautiful, satisfying a deep and violent urge, and horrifying--and  _ god _ , is anyone who has ever loved her going to die? Is she going to kill him with her bare hands, like this? Is this what it’s come to? Is this who she is, a woman so possessed of a thoughtless grief, a mindless rage, she might as well be a beast?

Lily doesn’t want to kill him. It would be better to die--it’s a siren song of an idea. If only Severus would close his hands around her throat, it could all be over so quickly. But he hasn’t. He won’t.

She bends, hands loosening to rest on his shoulders, something rising like tears in her throat, hair curtaining around her face to hide the transformation from rage to grief. It's cracking, all of it, all her carefully constructed rage and control, and she can't stop it.

He coughs beneath her and his hands on her collarbone are now far less a threat--they are very nearly a comfort. She despises it but she doesn’t want him to pull away. He doesn’t move them. “Lily,” he says, sounding hoarse.

Lily shakes her head, tears bubbling up to the surface and making her voice muddy. "God, Severus--"

He loosens one hand from her shoulder, touching it to his broken lip experimentally. "It's fine."

"It  _ isn't, _ " she says, leaning close, brushing a finger across his lip. "I tried to--" Lily chokes on it, can't say it aloud. 

"I said it's fine. I deserved that and likely more." And there's something in the set of his mouth that seems almost pleased they've finally fought, finally had this out, and now there can be a breath of honesty between them. “I did provoke you terribly.”

“You’re horrible. Why are you always so god-damn horrible.” She lets out little sound that isn't quite a laugh and isn't quite a whimper and wilts, her head sinking onto his shoulder. If she doesn’t look into his face she can stand it, can take the comfort, can take him. She mutters miserably, "How can you possibly still love me."

"Don't--" he says, going harsh. He puts one hand on the center of his back and levers himself up, sitting, and she slides into his lap. "Don't. None of this is your fault."

She chokes. "Enough of it." 

Severus watches her face, his eyes opaque, cryptic. There’s nothing he can say to solve it, nothing he can do to fix any of it. The decision comes across his face so quickly Lily doesn’t even catch it, but later she wonders if he is giving the only thing he has to give. 

He presses his bloodied mouth to her throat to capture the sob starting there and swallow it whole.

Lily's breath hitches and her hands make fists in the shoulders of his robes. When he pulls away, there's a warm imprint there, and she knows it's his blood, left there by his lips.

This is all they have ever done, hurt and been hurt by one another, over and over. This would never be any different. When he lifts his face back up to meet her eyes, she doesn't hesitate, she doesn't flinch, she kisses him back as hard as she can, hoping wildly that it hurts him or her or both of them in equal measure, that they can find exactly the punishment each of them deserve in the other.

\--He knows, and he wants it too. There's teeth in the kiss he returns, the taste of blood on her lips from his. The hand on her back tightens against her spine.

It never really stops being a fight. Nothing between them ever has been anything less. Her clothes are already torn, and so are his, so a few more rips and tears don't make a meaningful difference; the sin has already been committed in his bed a few days ago so completing it again cannot possibly damn her more. Severus is so accustomed to violence that it is nothing to move from that to this; and for Lily this is, still, a kind of violence against herself. 

They both keep their boots on. There’s a flash of longing to whisper her dead husband's name in the throes of it just to hurt him, just to tell him this doesn't matter-- _ he _ doesn’t matter, this isn’t about  _ him _ \--but that blade cuts them both, and her more deeply. 

And it would be a lie.

It's entirely unlike the last time. He grips her hips so tightly it leaves finger-shaped bruises across her skin, no longer afraid to break her--it is impossible to break what is already so broken. And it's entirely like the last time, because it still, damnably, is lovemaking, makes nothing, only subsists on what is already in them both. It is better this way, at least, to offer her body than her undeserving heart. It is simpler to succumb to this perverse desire than to hear him say it, and he knows it. It is easier to accept his love when it leaves a mess between her legs.

When it is done, when she finds a moment of sweet and blank oblivion, when the hand on her back seizes her hair in a fist and he shudders breathlessly beneath her, the effort to push him away seems impossible. Lily can no more disentangle her body from Severus’ than she can disentangle her life from his. Both of their wands stay under the bed, in a kind of truce, and he helps her to her feet and to the bed where he wraps his body tight around hers.

The last thing Lily thinks before sleep takes her is that blood in his mouth did not taste a thing like absolution.


	37. Absolution

Lily wakes up alone in Severus' bed in the middle of the night, which makes her want to shred the pillow in her hands for a variety of reasons, none of them good.

Her wedding band and engagement ring are still there, where Severus flung them at her feet. They still feel like an accusation. Before she can stop herself--before she can pick them up and know she’ll never put them down or take them off again--she kicks them under the bed.

"Out," she says when she finds him in the laboratory. "I need to brew something and I want privacy."

He’s just preparing ingredients so he has no excuse to stay, nothing that must be stirred under cold moonlight or left to crystalize beneath stars. "What are you brewing?"

"What do you  _ think? _ Or do they not go over that with the boys?" 

Which is both true and not the whole truth. It’s enough to make him blanch, though. He puts down the knife he’s been stripping the marigold stems with. “Lily--”

She hates the way he says her name like he's about to forgive her. Forgiveness is for people who deserve it and Lily knows, without a shadow of a doubt, that she doesn’t. “Go, unless we’re out of tansy pollen. I’ll be a half-hour at the outside and I don’t want your help.”

It's some of the oldest witchcraft there is, more a tea than a potion, and most of it could be done by a muggle: raspberry leaf, angelica root, pennyroyal as bitter as sin and almost as poisonous if not handled with care. Magic makes it entirely effective, ensuring nothing but guilt grows inside of her. It’s only luck that nothing has from the last time, and Lily doesn't intend to make relying on luck a habit. She hasn’t really intended to make any of this a habit, but she has also given up predicting the future. She drinks it down while it's still warm from the cauldron and tries not to think about the taste.

And then Lily pilfers the last thing she needs, swallows down the last of her pride, the last of her trust, the last of everything, and goes to the library where Severus is at his desk, penning some correspondence.

"Come on," she says from the doorway. "We need to talk." 

She doesn't wait for him to follow. He will, eventually; he has for so long that there’s no chance he won’t now.

In the kitchen, she pours one glass of liquor, and then another--the good stuff, deep and rich and intoxicating even just on the nose. Severus enters the kitchen thirty seconds behind her and the second glass goes onto the table, sliding toward him.

There's a measure of silence, and then the faint bell-like tone of fingers on a glass. It chimes again when he sets it down. Good; he won't make her be patient. She doesn't know if she has it in herself to be patient. She waits, then asks, "What are you hiding from me?"

"Many things," he says immediately in a flat, toneless voice. "Very little of import. A few books, I returned your wedding ring and your engagement ring--" He cuts himself off abruptly. She looks over her shoulder and he's shaking his head weakly, woozily, lifting the glass to inspect it. "What did you put in this?"

"Veritaserum. Just half a drop to loosen your tongue, not enough to totally knock you off your block. And  _ returned _ is a funny way to say  _ flung in my face to hurt me. _ "  She slugs back her own glass and refills it, then takes the seat across from him. "Did you ever dose me?"

"No," he grinds out, starting at the glass as if he could smash it with the power of his anger. “You've drugged me.”

"I have. Haven’t you drugged me? Amortentia? Complicio?"

"Amortentia smells like blood and a cellar full of books and..." His face twists. He's fighting it, offering up a different truth instead, but he's losing, she can see it. "And that shampoo you used to have, the one that smelled like sugared violets. No. Never. How dare you even  _ ask _ ."

That is not the answer she wants. "Did you ever consider dosing me?"

Honesty is a relentless light, and there is no refuge. "Yes," he answers, through his teeth, because the truth is he's not so much of a better man than all that, and they both know that's why she's asked at all. 

"Why didn't you?"

It kicks around his mouth for a moment, that fight in him, and then comes out in a furious torrent. "It wouldn't be enough. It wouldn't be real."

"Is it real now? This?" She gestures to the space between them, to everything that's transpired hanging in the air between them like a noose. "Is this what you wanted?"

"No. You must know that," he spits.

"Didn't, actually. Both of us, we’re perverse enough it might have been." She takes another sip. It's quite a good bottle, she can recognize it even without the proper palate for the stuff; shame to use it like this and fail to taste it. "What did you want?"

He's gone rigid and white with effort and rage, but it's dragged from him nonetheless, a growl like it's pulling his very guts out and he's trying not to scream: " _ More _ ."

And doesn't that ring the church bells in the next town over? Doesn't that paint everything in color?

"And what if I never--if nothing ever happened?"

He grips the edge of the table like he's dangling off the edge of a cliff, white-knuckling through the words. "I was-- _ am _ \--willing to accept it."

She wants to scream  _ liar _ in his face, but she holds onto her temper. He can’t be. This is the truth she wanted, unvarnished, complete. But there’s still a shadow of doubt. “Half a thing is better than nothing at all.”

He fights it for almost a full minute; it was only the tiniest bit of the potion smudged in the bottom of the glass with her thumb, so she lets him go at it; he’ll lose. It’s the nature of the drug, but it’s the nature of Severus to fight it anyway. Finally he says, “Half of the wrong thing can be worse than nothing. We both know that now, I should think.”

“Don’t presume to tell me what’s worse than nothing.” She had been so sure and she wants to press. "But you never dosed me? Never once, not even in a moment of weakness?"

He looks like he could launch himself across the table and kill her with his bare hands for asking twice even with the Veritaserum working its way through him. It’s deserved; at this point, anything he wants to fling at her is. 

But in once decisive, smooth movement, he lifts the tainted drink to his lips and drains the glass. The empty thing rings when he sets it on the table and his burning black eyes meet hers. "Never."

It's moving, as far as displays of truth and trust go. Unfortunately, it does not go terribly far anymore. "No spells? No--other Obliviation? No charms, curses, artefacts--"

"No." It comes out strangled. "Never. Never once, not when you were recovering from the memory charm, not when you were injured in my care after Bellatrix flayed you alive with my own curse, not when we were children, not when we were in school, not when you were wed and I was truly a Death Eater with no other allegiance.  _ Never _ ." He sways slightly with the effort--it's taking effect, the rest of the dose, and the alcohol on what must be an empty stomach. "The only magic I have ever performed on you against your will was to save your life that night I abducted you from your happy home, a thing I know you have regretted since. A thing I have sought to never replicate." A foul gleam is in his eye, then, a victory. "Everything else-- _ everything _ \--has been with my understanding of your absolute consent."

Lily can hear what is encompassed within everything and she cannot disagree. A sour frustration makes its home at the back of her throat, puncturing all her fury. "Then there's no explanation for it."

"For what?" His voice is slowed slightly after the tirade, thick with the heavier dosage as it enters his bloodstream, quick as witchcraft.

"For--for when I look at you, I still--" She hesitates, reaches behind herself for the bottle again, fills her glass again and his.  "I feel things I wish I didn't."

They both know alcohol compounds the effects of Veritaserum. He'll be a puddle of black robes and spite on the floor if he drinks much more, but she doesn't care and it seems like he doesn't, either. That's a bridge to cross when they meet it. He lifts the glass, inspecting it, inspecting her through it with one dark, glassy eye that can't disguise a measure of a feral kind of hope. "Even now?"

"Even now." He deserves this truth, at least, and it's not as if it's a pleasant one. "I hate you. More than I can put into words. But it doesn't--there's the other thing, too, and they don't cancel out. It's just chaos." She looks away from him for the first time, watches the amber liquid in her glass swirl in her palm as she tilts it to and fro. "I had hoped there would be an antidote, a countercurse. Some easy explanation. Some way to rip it out of me."

"You are not alone in that," he says, sounding hollow.

Lily washes the taste of that truth out of her mouth with another long pull on her glass. When she sets it down, she's ready to ask more. "And you? Have you always wanted to--rip it out of you?"

He sways, in his seat, tracing a whorl in the grain of the wood on the table before him with a fingertip, around and around and around. She’d meant the question to hurt him, in a way, but when he replies it’s almost gentle. "Not always."

"Most days, though."

"Yes. Most days. It would be easier." His fingertip has stopped at the center of the knot in the wood, and he taps it once, twice. “I could have been great, in the Dark Lord’s service, had I not wanted so badly to save you. I was respected. Had power. You ruined it all.” His head tilts, as if he’s trying to make out something far away. “Or I did, trying to preserve your life.” He focuses on her again, eyes blank beneath his lashes, and his voice is free of affect, entirely empty. “You have repaid me by taking advantage of me. My trust. We trusted each other, once."

"I remember trusting you once," she agrees, more defeated than angry. But any mistrust between them now is deserved. “Shall we measure it out, then? Who has wronged who more?”

He sighs and for a flash, she almost  _ likes _ him like this--sad and honest, for once. “We both know who is guiltier in that accounting. I know what I’ve robbed you of. You've been quite clear.”

“Have I? Tell me.” The heat in her voice bleeds away to the cold order of control. “I want to hear you say it.”

He meets her eyes with his own, steady and bottomless as the night sky. They catch all the light in the room and hold it still. “I left your family to die. I sacrificed their lives to preserve yours, a thing I wanted more for myself and for the memory of our shared past than for your own sake.”

It’s said plainly, but not easily. There’s no defense, no argument in it, nothing but the bald and horrible truth. It doesn’t feel any better, hearing him say it, and it doesn’t kill the other thing inside her. Her vision blurs momentarily with tears. 

“Yes,” she says, her voice less steady than she might have hoped. “If you were trying to protect me you really cocked it up.” She swallows, trying to beat it back, but the outpouring can’t be denied. “No one in my life has ever hurt me as much as you, Severus. You stole my family, stole my best friend, stole the whole world and I don't understand how I can  _ possibly _ care for you so much, after everything, and half the time I can’t tell if I want to kill you or--” No.  _ No. _ She hasn’t wept in front of him since the charm and she will not start now. She presses her hand to her mouth and shakes her head, blinking rapidly. A few steadying breaths and another pull on the glass and it’s gone. It’s gone because it has to be. Forward. “That’s why I thought you must be dosing me. Because it just doesn’t make any sense any other way. Not after everything you've done.” She lets out a half of a strangled laugh. “I even-- that night you got the doe, when I slept in your bed that first time, do you know what I was reading?”

He measures her, intrigued. “I had wondered.”

"It was book on Dark magic and bindings. I figured the Mark was a binding, even then. I wanted--I hoped I could get rid of it. I hoped I could save you from it."

His laugh goes wide and wild, not the stifled sound it usually is, but it’s hollow. "Save  _ me _ . Of course you did.” He comes back, inspects her face. “Not anymore, though.”

"No. Not anymore."

They sit like that for lord knows how long, unable to look at each other, guilt hanging between them on a thread. They have both been terribly cruel. There is no equivocation for it; their crimes against each other do not zero, they mount, a pile of picked bones that no calculus of guilt can absolve for either of them.

Then she says, "Come on. It’s the middle of the night and you need to sleep the rest of it off."

She hoists him onto a shoulder and he sways into her, up the stairs. He's tall but skinny as a rail and it makes him awkward to help up; he tries to hold his head up but it lolls and finally comes to rest against her shoulder. His feet manage to stay under him on the stairs, for the most part; she only has to hold him tight to her side for a single unbalanced second. A lock of his hair snakes its way inside of her blouse, tickling her shoulderblade, and she hates it. She hates that she wants this affection, hates the comfort of his arm draped over her shoulders, hates the pleasure of giving him help and of her arm around his waist where she can feel him breathe next to her, hates  _ him _ almost as much as herself for doing it to him. But the truth--

The truth is, whatever else she feels is her own, nothing more and nothing less. Which makes her the worst kind of monster. A traitor twice over.

When Lily brings him around to face her, readying him to be dumped into bed, his mouth rests against her collarbone, and he whispers something almost inaudible.

"What was that, then?" Lily asks pulling his robes from his shoulders.

Behind his hair, his lips lift toward the shell of her ear. "I love you."

She starts unbuttoning the frock coat and purses her lips. It's the last thing she wants to hear just now. "You've said."

"Yes," he says, blinking down at her. "But now you know it for the truth."

He's down to his shirtsleeves and trousers and it will have to do. She isn't going further, not with him in this state. The danger of a misunderstanding on both sides is worth him waking up rumpled. "Try to get some sleep. I expect you'll be very cross with me when you're back to your senses."

"Exceedingly," he agrees, sanguine, sitting on the bed and trying to inelegantly hoist his legs up with him. "I don't know if I'll forgive you."

"You shouldn't. It’s not as if I’m going to forgive you for any of it." It's almost as if neither of them can help telling the truth, now, the way the Veritaserum is supposed to work. "For what it's worth, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have. I was so sure--" she sighs. The accusation won't help. "I’m sorry for all of it. If you want to throw me out tomorrow, or--anything. I'll do as you say."

"For once."

She snorts. "You wouldn't like me if I always did as you said. If I were some tractible little girl."

"Certainly not." He's finally managed to hoist his long limbs onto the bed, his hair splayed around him. He lifts a lock away from his face and mutters, halfhearted, to the ceiling. "You should stay."

He doesn't mean in the house; he means here, in this room, in his bed. It’s a terrible idea, but no less tempting for it. Physical comfort has its attraction despite it all. She chides in a gentle whisper, "Don't be pathetic. It doesn't suit you."

He scrubs his hand over his eyes, and then his hand flutters nervously and then comes to rest on her knee. "I've looked. You must know I have. No way to remove the Mark, no antidote for… the other. I would give it, if I had."

"I know. It's all right."

"Isn't," he says, a sleepy discontent still tugging at the corner of his mouth.

The easy intimacy of this moment has come at such a high price, but it's already paid for. She leans close, brushes hair away from his face. “I know it’s not.”

It's just the magic and the chemicals working their way through him, but there's almost a ghost of a smile on his face at the touch of her fingertips. And for half a moment, Lily wonders if she hasn't given up more information than he has.

The construct is still weeping in her old room. It seems like it has been for days. She wonders if it’s eaten, if it ever sleeps, what it must know and feel.

Lily sleeps in the library.

In the morning, the kitchen sink is full of every bottle of alcohol in the house--all empty--along with every bottle of Veritaserum. She catches him pouring the last of the clear potion down the drain.

She’s too tired to argue any more. Lily watches him finish and cast the bottle into the sink atop the rest, and then asks quietly, “Are we going to talk about it?”

He doesn’t turn, measuring at the heap. One bottle shifts, clinking against the other. He says to the bottles, “I think not.” With an efficient gesture of his wand, he vanishes the lot.

“Fine by me.” They had talked enough for several lifetimes. Lily rubs her temple. “Little Hangleton?”

It is truly a question, not an order, and as such it's also an offering. And he hears it, he must, the way he straightens.

He looks up at her then, finally. “Yes. Little Hangleton.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Credit for the invention of the potion complicio that Lily mentions must go to the wonderful terri_testing; if you enjoy the Lily here, you may enjoy the Lily from their fic "Winter." I highly, HIGHLY recommend it.


	38. A Different Trap

"Why isn’t there more protection around this? The locket had elaborate protections, by the sound of it; the book and the cup had watchdogs; the diadem had Hogwarts itself. But there's nothing here but a few standard charms to protect the area from tampering. Kid stuff." She cuts her gaze sideways. "Why?”

He’s standing there, she knows, but invisible, camouflaged into the background. There’s nothing to look at but there is, still, the palpable warm weight of a body beside her.

“Perhaps Regulus is wrong.” He lets out a breath and it mists, barely, in the cold afternoon air. “Or perhaps the Dark Lord knew that powerful wards could attract the attention of the powerful.”

“Together, then? Dispel them and see if my Dark Detector picks anything up?” The black stone they attuned to Horcruxes--so useful in Hogwarts, now hoping to prove its utility once more--is in her palm but the only heat it’s given off thus far is the heat picked up from her own palm.

“Together,” he says, and with a faint crackle of magic he begins to unlace the wards. She follows suit.

It only takes a minute with both of them working. “This should be the last. Be ready, if it’s not what it seems,” he says, and she assumes a dueling stance, wand in one hand, Dark Detector in the other.

When the last ward comes down, Lily gasps. The Detector goes hot--shockingly hot, shockingly fast. 

“Nothing’s wrong,” she says quickly, feeling the rush of air as Severus turns toward her. “Just--the Detector’s picking something up.”

“It’s here, then,” he says grimly.

“Something is, at any rate.”

The shack is the same as it was when it was wrapped in wards, though: nothing to look at. It lies in state as it must have been left, in disrepair. The packet of papers had a lot of research-- _ way too much _ research, Lily thought, wondering if Regulus had delayed them deliberately--but the main bit was a map. Tom Riddle was a Junior to a Senior: a young man who used to live in the manor house up the hill. A man who had died young, with his family, in that manor house in a locked room with no marks on his body. The deaths had baffled the Muggle justice system, of course, but any Wizard would see it and feel a chill run down their spine.

It had apparently taken some amount of doing to get even the muggle police report; the papers themselves had a crescent of punctures that Lily immediately understood to be dog teeth. Other documentation about the long and storied House of Slytherin, the house of Peverell, a thousand other noble and extinct lines between, turned to the house of Gaunt. This part was copied out longhand in Regulus’ flowing script gone mad in some kind of unmentioned but visible hurry, the o's turning to lines and the crosses to t's spanning half the sheet. The House of Gaunt had dwindled, had diminished, had died here in the hands of its final heir with that muggle name, reborn anew as a Dark Lord of no House at all.

The stairs creak as she ascends but there's no one to hear it. There’s is sometime white nailed to the door of the shack, something that resolves itself into a bone--a piece of spine ringed with rib. On the porch below the door, there is more of them, and finally, the last: a skull. No limb-bones to be found in the scatter. Of course. The skeleton of a snake.

“Nothing on the house itself,” Lily says, lifting the skull to her face. The hollow sockets stare back. “Maybe it knows I’m a parselmouth?”

He halts, halfway up beside her. “You’re a  _ what.” _

“The wards, I mean, maybe they can tell."

His tone is icy, dangerous. "How?"

Which means all the meanings of the word: how did it happen, how did you find out, how is this possible? All valid, of course. "The construct and I, we--well, really,  _ he _ \--figured it out. Slytherin’s monster is a basilisk, I could talk to it. Must be recent enough, you know as well as I do that I didn't grow up talking to snakes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me this?” he spits, plainly furious.

“I  _ meant  _ to. We--” She shakes her head, clearing it, the reason plain but hating that she has to speak it like he doesn't remember. “We didn’t debrief, after.”

The silence beside her is a solid and breathing thing. She plows on, doggedly.

“And the next morning, there were a lot of new things to think about. It didn’t seem nearly as important.” She puts the skull back down, brushes her hands off on her trousers. “I can’t tell if there’s anything here. Can you?”

“No,” he says slowly from far closer to her than he had been; she almost jumps. The door creaks open slowly at the prodding of his wand.

There’s only darkness inside. They creep in, expecting ambush, but there’s nothing. Only darkness and dust.

The shack has clearly not been even entered by anyone other than small animals in years. Every shelf on the pantry is askew, exposing dust-covered dishes with their shattered mates poured across the counter and floor below, empty and chewed-through packaging for food purchased sometime when both Lily and Severus were babes in arms, so old that even the rot doesn’t smell anymore. They take down every package, methodical, careful, finding nothing but animal droppings and an old rat nest. The horcrux detector in her hand stays hot, throbbing, but giving nothing more. The pulse feels strongest in the center of the room but there’s nothing there but an overturned chair and a table, which Lily disassembles into its component parts and then, in frustration as the hours grow long, begins to carve into long ribbons of wood, hoping to find something placed inside the grain while Severus scans the inside of the walls inch by painstaking inch. But there's nothing.

The search of is done slowly, methodically, and turns up precisely nothing. Lily stands turning in the center of the room, and Severus moves outside to check the roof and the steps and the ground surrounding the foundation.

Something--the Dark Detector, or perhaps something else--tells Lily he won’t find anything. She looks up at the ceiling and considers blasting a hole in it just to see if there’s anything in the rafters. Her wand is up, ready to shoot a blasting hex upward, when the toe of her boot catches on a floorboard.

Something in the creak the floorboard gives doesn’t sound like the rest of the aged wood creaking of the rest of this place. It sounds wrong. Different. She runs the toe of her boot along it again and finds the floorboard next to it also creaking, also loose. She kicks at it, then lifts, and with shocking ease a whole segment of floor comes loose.

“Severus, I’ve found something--” Lily calls. She crouches, lifts the apparent trapdoor, and finds nothing but loose dirt. But the Dark Detector is thrumming louder, now, beating a bloody tattoo in her fist, and she thrusts her free hand unerringly into the earth and lifts free a small wooden box. “Severus--”

He’s come to the door, asking some kind of question, but Lily has already lifted the lid off of the small wooden box, and all sound has fallen away. All she can hear is her own heartbeat, drumming wildly in her chest and in her hand.

The ring is beautiful, the black stone glinting back the last of the afternoon sun streaming through the window, and Lily knows what it is. It's the Resurrection Stone. A Deathly Hallow. And the shadows in the corners of the shack are no longer so grim, but welcoming, full of ghosts waiting to be brought back, every empty space inside of her a door waiting to be opened to pour out all those she has loved and lost, the long and howling emptiness that has consumed her waiting to be full of voices and names and faces. Not just James and Harry but everyone--her friends gone in the war, her father gone before it began--the people she doesn't even know if she has lost--that loving and hopeful girl in the mirror who wanted to fight without truly understanding the terrible cost of war, that it could devour her whole self and still leave the suffering beast of her body alive to bear it.

All she has to do is put on the ring.

As if moving through water, she reaches towards it, towards  _ them, _ towards love. She can hear someone calling her name--James? No, not James, someone else. But he doesn't matter. He is no one. He is alive while James and Harry are waiting. They have both been waiting so long. A scarred and pale hand closes around her arm with inhuman strength, holding tight, bruising her, trying to wrench her bodily away from the ring, but the it's in her hand and they are so close--

It slides onto her finger where her wedding ring would have gone, and for a brief and shining moment she thinks-- _ yes, I am married to a dead man, but that doesn't mean he is dead forever, there is magic in this world and I can have him back, I can have all of them back-- _ and there is an outline of a man holding a child, a silhouette with messy dark hair and round glasses that she has wanted to see so badly,  _ god _ , her heart is breaking to see them again, to speak with him, to tell him how sorry she is about everything, she feels as though she is overflowing with a sudden fullness, knowing they are coming for her.

There is a scent of flesh burning, and someone is screaming, but it can't be her, though her mouth is open and her face is wet with tears, but they are tears of joy, they must be, the feeling in her chest must be joy. If there is the price to see them she is prepared to pay it, to pay anything. Her vision is narrowing to a point just as her son's face emerges from the shadows, and someone is gripping her left arm and shouting over a violent crackle of magic--

It all snaps back into focus, horribly, dizzyingly. The shadows are empty again and she is alone, again, even as Severus has her left hand in his right, wand stretched toward it, muttering incantation after incantation. Her hand is numb for a moment and then in agony, and she gasps. In his hands there is a ruined thing, blackened as if it has been in a fire.

It's her hand, she realizes with horror. Her hand is black and blistered and she can feel the fire crawling up her arm. But even as she realizes it, the pain is numbed--not gone, it prickles across her skin and through her bones, but it is deadened. Just like the other pain. Her face feels impossibly distant from her body; her knees weak; her hammering heart, gone cold. Lily tries to flex her fingers.

"Don't," Severus says, hoarse. "You'll make it worse."

"It's not a Horcrux, Sev," she hears herself whimper. "We were wrong, it's the Resurrection Stone, it's going to bring them back, it's going to bring all of them back--"

"It's a horcrux," he snarls, "and heavily cursed besides. Why would you--" His face is flushed with something like rage. Rage would be fine. Rage is familiar. Rage she understands. This collapsing look is worse. He rummages in his belt, but his hands are shaking too badly to remove anything with accuracy. He curses once, twice, and then points his wand in for a searing second of agony to summon the golden potion--the cursebreaker--and thrusts into her hands. "Drink," he commands.

She drinks. The pain ebbs, then begins to turn in on itself where it once had surged forward up her arm like an inexorable tide.

He works, cursing under his breath, fighting with the curse until the agony has seared through everything, through her confusion, through the disappointment, through her rage, leaving her weak and clammy with sweat. When Severus finally sinks back against the wall, pressing his pale and sweat-streaked face between his hands, she can only assume he's done all he can.

He’s done all he can, and the ring will not come off her finger. He’s done all he can, and her hand is a blackened, burned thing. He’s done all he can and the curse holds.

Her voice is hoarse from screaming, the steadiness artificial from locking all the pain away. "What curse is it?"

He shakes his head slowly. His breath is still ragged. "It doesn't have a name. It's the Dark Lord's own invention. I could barely stop it before it consumed your entire arm. It would have taken the rest of your body with it. You'd be ashes."

It comes out robotic, slow. "Can it be reversed?"

He moves his hands and finally meets her eyes. His own are dark and full of a barely contained grief. If she asked again, she knows he’d tell her  _ perhaps. _ She knows he would lie.

She’s too numb to feel it, too deadened. "Can it be contained?"

He looks away, finally, head dipping with exhaustion, hair swinging before his face. "For a time."

"And then?"

Behind his hair, a glint of fire, that familiar impotent rage. "It will consume you."


	39. Widowmaker

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I also did a playlist, if you're into that kind of thing. It is, of course, a giant fucking bummer. One song on it isn't on Spotify so YouTube is one track longer, but they're otherwise identical. Enjoy. [Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/user/mwa0id433svxzzhjq0q41mvu7/playlist/6nrv16YiH0l64xjOaX6P67) | [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLn2GFZzGbSZHQdNHY1udu4AQIgALBR9Op)

In the library, Severus is pulling book after book from the shelf, stacking it on the desk when it fails to contain what he needs. He won’t say what he’s looking for, which is worrisome in the extreme, and he moves like a man possessed of an idea so incendiary he must keep running after it or catch fire himself.  

He doesn’t even look up when he speaks to her. “You need rest. You are not helping by watching me.”

“I’m watching you because you won’t tell me what you’re planning and you are  _ clearly _ planning something.” Lily paces up and down the library, flexing her now-numb left hand. “Can you break the curse on this damn thing or destroy a horcrux with  _ rest? _ ”

His mouth turns to a fine line as he glances up from the book he’s currently inspecting. “No.”

“What, then?”

He flicks a page, agitation evident on his face; his anxiety is like a plucked thread resonating throughout them both and has been ever since they got back from the shack. “You should not have touched the ring at all.”   
  


“You  _ know _ why I touched it.” Lily puts her left hand on the bookshelf in front of her, looking at the scorched flesh and the black stone set in gold affixed intractably to her finger, feeling the pressure of the wood beneath her fingers but not its temperature nor its texture. It’s an unnerving side-effect of Severus’ work to stop the spread of the curse, but it’s better than chopping her arm off at the elbow, which was the other alternative. Not that doing so would have stopped the spread, Severus assured her. The curse was part of her the moment she put the ring on her finger. “It’s probably the same damn charm I used on the nightshade. Mental projection, maybe some siren-song charm in the mix. I knew what it was right away. That was the trap, that was the protection.” She sighs. “I know I’m a fool, you don’t have to say it.”

He doesn’t look at her as he closes a book and picks up another to skim. “Your actions are entirely understandable.”

She starts, swings her head around to stare at him. “Like hell they are. Not to you.”

He doesn’t look up. “Were I in your position, it would be understandable, as you were seduced--”

A fraction of his intent snaps into focus. “Are you planning to get killed, doing whatever you’re doing?”

He continues as if she hasn’t spoken. “--you were seduced by the power of a magical artefact, which even without a powerful curse--”

She scrubs her hand over her face, patience waning. “That’s your story, not mine.”

“--even  _ without _ a powerful curse, which it had, would be tempting in the extreme,” he says louder, flipping pages. "You put it on because--"

“I put it on because I wanted my husband back, and you  _ know _ that,” she shouts, slamming her deadened fist into the book case. The declaration leaves a ringing silence. Lily swallows, and the pushes the panic and fear and despair down as far as she can. Her voice comes out soft but she looks up at him. “You prefer him dead, and you think I’m a fool for being taken in by it.”

His eyes are narrowed but he's finally looking at her, and his voice is low, even, deadly. “Very well. Were I in your position, I would have known better. I would have been able to tell it was heavily cursed since I am more familiar with the Dark Arts than you. I tried to stop you and you didn’t listen, and for it you’ve taken on a curse that may prove deadly if I can’t find a way to stop it.”

Her face half-breaks into a wry kind of smile, though she can feel the corners of it trembling. “That’s more like it.” She takes a steadying breath and then another, flinching slightly as a fresh and sparkling surge of pain echoes through the otherwise numb fingertips of her left hand. It’s hard to focus like this, harder still to outsmart Severus in what he’s working toward, so Lily approached it with the only instrument she has: the blunt one. “Now will you tell me what you’re planning that is going to get you killed?”

“No.” He summons a new volume from a high shelf. “You will not win this fight, Lily, so I suggest you don’t start it.” He stops halfway through the book, scans a page in the volume in his hands, fingertip tracing down the words once, twice. “Ah. There it is. This will do.”

Before she can catch a glimpse, he’s snapped the book shut and sent it flying again, and before it’s even slotted itself in the space where it goes he’s gone for the door, swept past her with an efficiency of movement that makes Lily feel slow and stupid. She swipes for him with a hand--the wrong one, the weakened one--and he slips through it.

She wastes precious seconds looking up at the book, torn between pulling the book down with a charm so she can look at it later--harder without the name--and following him. A fresh surge of scorching pain courses through the ashen thing that used to be her palm. Following wins. “Severus,” she calls after him. “Wait!” He’s in the entry hall putting on his cloak when she tumbles down the steps after him. "You can't just--"

"I can, and I will." 

Lily skitters to a halt and realizes she’s holding onto her ruined hand, clutching it to her chest. She lets it go with an effort, letting her hands swing at her sides, feeling childish. “When will you be back, then?”

He looks past her face to calculate, as if looking directly at her will soften the resolve shining like steel in his eyes. “If I do not return within five hours, run.”

She flinches.  _ “Run?” _

“Run,” he says again. “Perhaps to the Potter Estate, or to Sirius and Regulus, or elsewhere. It would be best if I do not know. I will be unable to send any other message, and unable to receive one. Sending a patronus or receiving one would be a death warrant, so do not attempt it.” 

Which is an answer, in a way, and she wants to curse herself for being so slow to see it. “Severus, are you going to see-- _ him?” _

His lip curls into something entirely unlike a smile, confirming her worst fears. “I suggest you burn down the house if I fail. Fiendfyre should destroy the remaining Horcruxes.” With a sharp nod, he turns from her on his heel--she’s gaping, she knows she is--and opens the door.

Her fingertips almost manage to catch the tail of his cloak, but they slip through her weakened hand and he’s gone before she can catch him.

Or say goodbye.

Lily rotates slowly on the spot, muttering a string of profanity toward the ceiling. This is more like the Severus from  _ before _ , insulating her, baffling her, taking off like a bat in the night and telling her nothing, a status quo established when she was confined to a bed and barely able to keep down water. Just because it’s some value of normal doesn’t mean it’s comforting. It was easier for him to run off when she was too infirm to chase, and it was easier for her when she had her usual handful of other responsibilities. Now she’s just meant to--what,  _ wait _ ?

Well, he never had concerned herself with what she had been  _ doing _ those long hours he was away. There’s a reason why she’d read every novel on the one shelf of fiction Severus had in the library at least twice. 

The toe-tapping nerves let up after the first fretful half-hour of checking and double-checking their preparations for flight, made so long ago. The construct wearing her own face drifts past and Lily locks it in the bedroom with all the flowers. If it does come to burning the house down, she won’t hesitate, but she’d prefer not to hear it scream.

When that’s done, Lily manages to make her way through more books on bindings, more notes--less savage ones than the ones at the bottom of the stack--to prise forth a solution to the newest problem. Defeating the Dark Lord’s net of immortality is unbearably close, just one Horcrux away; the Dark matters of destroying them are left to Severus and Regulus who seem to have it well enough in hand. But the fact remains that the Dark Lord, even mortal, is an incredibly powerful wizard, capable of astonishing magic, unheard-of destruction, enchantments the like of which hadn’t been heard of since the days of the Peverells and the Founders of Hogwarts. Lily is an able duelist, as is Sirius; Severus is an exceptional one. But to believe one of them, or all of them together, could be capable of destroying the Dark Lord without some kind of assistance, some kind of augmentation, some kind of additional source of power to tilt the odds in their favor is optimism to the point of madness.

The binding of the Dark Mark, from what she can tell and what she’s gleaned from Severus’ clipped commentary on the subject, allows a flow of power between the Marked and the master. The  _ conpartior lux _ , that mad thing Severus had suggested before Bellatrix had come, was the closest to the Mark; it allowed the  _ force of life _ \--whatever that meant, the book was a hundred years old if it were a day--and magical energies to be drawn from one wizard to the other. The Dark Lord, Severus has implied, had modified it to be one-way; to draw only from the Death Eaters to him, imbuing him with their power in addition to his own.

The fact that Severus has suggested he Mark himself once more for her own safety did not escape her notice, either, but she lets that thought lie. It wouldn’t do her any good now, not with the curse gnawing at her arm like a caged rat.

The ring, though, is more interesting. Two of the three Deathly Hallows in their possession is an interesting prospect. The vision of James and Harry from the ring’s temptation has been stuffed down, locked away, so far gone and so secure she’s almost forgotten it. Now, rereading the same passage over and over and failing again to take it in, the stone catches the light. She wonders if, despite everything, it could bring them back.

Lily doesn’t know anything about the Resurrection Stone besides the children’s tale, though, and the warning there is clear enough: it is more likely to tempt a person towards their own death than pull anyone lost back from the dead. Frank seemed to believe otherwise, though that might be his own desperation.

And what of her own desperation, then?

A fresh wave of tingling, electric pain surges through her hand for a moment and Lily wonders if she’ll see Harry and James soon enough, with or without the stone’s help. She redoubles her efforts and tries to focus on her books.

After three and a half twitching and lonesome hours of research, the sound of footfalls at the door of the library is a blessing. She comes to her feet and steadies herself with a palm on the desk as the dark silhouette fills the door. “Five hours then run, Severus,  _ honestly, _ ” is all she can come up with, voice suffused with relief.

“You should ask me something,” he says. “Confirm my identity.” He looks drawn but victorious, like he’s been through a wringer. He must have been, if he’s gone to see-- if he really had managed to--

“If you’re someone else I’m already dead. Probably am anyway,” she says, lifting the blackened palm and sweeping away his concern with numbed fingertips. “Where did you go? What did you--”

He holds up a phial. Lily recognizes it as crystal, the walls a triple-thickness layered with charms, the kind designed to hold the most corrosive and vile of potions and poisons. And even in this it is already etching the inside of the phial, eating away at the crystal. A smile curls at the edges of his mouth. “You said the beast of Slytherin was a basilisk--the beast you spoke with and controlled as a parselmouth. Tom Riddle is descended from Slytherin and unleashed the thing himself. Basilisk venom is destructive enough to harm even a horcrux.”

The horror must show on her face. “So you just--what, asked the Dark Lord for basilisk venom?”

“In essence.”

It’s madness. It’s--frankly, it’s something _she_ would do. And she sat here and read books. “Severus, that’s the most dangerous thing I’ve ever heard of.” She reaches for him, half because it really is brilliant and half to shake him and scream at him for attempting something so dangerous, but stops short. “You could have _died_ and you’re not even sure if this will work.” 

“It will work,” he says, and there’s that steel again. It will work because it has to.

They decide on the laboratory as a staging ground. The visegrips are already attached to the tabletop; a strap cinched around her wrist and across the back of her palm, attached thus, holds her steady. The first pipette Severus dips into the phial dissolves immediately, and he must rummage for a crystal one and charm it more impervious before even extracting a single drop.

Lily is about to say  _ all right, Severus, do it. _ The words are on her lips and a droplet of venom shivers at the end of the pipette when she hears something. A faraway wail. "Do you hear that?"

Severus pauses, gaze flickering up to her face for a moment. "Don't move. If I miss you will lose a finger."

"There it is again. Severus, hold off."

He carefully puts the pipette back into the phial, but doesn't remove his dragonhide gloves. "What do you hear?"

"It sounds like a baby. It's crying." She scans his face, but there's nothing. "Can't you hear it?"

His head swivels to the window, and then he nods, slowly, confusion creasing his brow. "I can hear it."

There's a sound of the door creaking open, a single footfall. Severus' looks to the door behind her, beyond her, and the horror that paints Severus' thin face, then, can only mean one person. The Dark Lord himself, catching them mid-treason. 

It's over. It's all over, and they are both going to die.

\--But the voice the voice isn’t that. There’s no spell, no violence, no screaming death. Just a voice she thought she’d never hear again. “So.  _ Him. _ I wish I could say I'm surprised.” 

She doesn’t dare turn unless it breaks the spell, it’s the stone, it must be the stone doing this. Lily fumbles with the straps holding her hand to the table."Severus--" she says, her voice low and shaking.

The voice behind her continues. “I just can’t believe it’s  _ him. _ What could have possibly been going through your mind, Lily, to go for--I mean, honestly, just  _ look _ at him.”

She can’t stand it any longer. Tearing her hand free. Lily turns, clutching her ruined hand to her chest.

He’s standing there, handsome, almost luminous, mess of hair atop his head, shirt rumpled, hands stuffed in his pockets. “James,” she breathes, and it comes out a tight, broken-hearted sound.

He makes a scoffing noise and it’s wrong, something is wrong. “I don’t know why I chased you for so long. It’s an insult, you know. Falling into bed with  _ that. _ ” He advances further, ambling easily toward them.

“James, I--what are you saying?” She can't understand the cruelty in his voice. In her darkest wishes she had felt, had  _ known _ if she could bring him back he would say her name and sweep her into his arms and never let her go. But he isn't. Something’s wrong. It’s something  _ she _ has done, and it’s wrong, and he knows. He  _ knows _ .

“You and-- _ him _ . God, I don’t even want to think about it.” He’s almost close enough to touch, his eyes lit from within, hypnotic.

“What are you saying?” she asks, voice breaking. It’s wrong, it’s all wrong. 

He narrows his eyes. “Don’t play stupid, don’t play cute. You may have everyone else fooled but not me, not anymore. I know what kind of woman you are.”

It isn’t hims--it can’t be him--but it is still entirely too close, speaking her worst fears into being. All her guilt, all her sorrows, exposed and ugly in that beautiful mouth. “You’re not James,” she says, voice gone thick and crooked. “My husband would never speak to me like this.”

“Your  _ husband _ never lived to see you step out on him with the enemy, so yeah, I guess I wouldn’t have.” He takes the final step closer, close enough to kiss. “I want the family ring back. You don’t deserve to wear it. Under his bed, isn't it? Where you left it?”

“Stop,” she whispers, fighting back tears. The man she had longed to see in the Gaunt shack, the vision she had wanted so badly to see again, to touch, and she had never considered how betrayed the man himself might feel if he could see her, if he knew what she has done. The pain in her hand is nothing compared to this.

James takes the last step between them and he’s a hair’s breadth away from her. She can feel the warmth radiating off his body, real and solid and hear and alive and full of hate. “Fine, you don’t want to talk about our marriage? Let’s talk about our son, and how you let him die.”

There is no more defense, no more denial she can offer. Even if it’s not him, it feels too much like the truth he might speak to her now. “I know,” Lily chokes out. “I'm sorry, I'm so sorry--” She reaches for him, reaches to try to touch him, to try to make him understand, but he flinches away from her grasp.

“I'd take it all back if I could,” he continues, relentless. “Should have gone for Mary. I suppose my grandmother was right. You can marry a mudblood but you can't train her.”

Severus voice is quiet and deadly behind her. “This has gone on long enough.” He seizes her arm in an iron grip and twists her hand free. He isn't gentle; he presses her wrist hard to table, pulling her halfway around and away from James.

Lily knows what he’s going to do, what he’s going to try, and he can’t--“ _ Don’t, no, please, _ ” --this is all that’s left of him, and even if he is laughing that high and cold laugh, even if he is horrific and cruel, she wants to cling to him as long as she can. She has wanted to badly to hear his voice, and it’s all so wrong, but she can make it right if she can just talk to him a little longer. If she only had more time.

But Severus is relentless. He lifts the pipette again, and the drop of venom falls unerringly onto the stone. 

For a moment it glistens there like a tear. The venom would corrode and eat into anything else, but it just lays there, and then gives off a wisp of smoke, and then James stops laughing.

The bead of venom begins to smoke, and then it burrows into the stone, eating away at it rapidly in a long line down the center as if the fang the venom was drawn from were plunged into the stone itself. The gold it is is set in begins to smoke, begins to melt; if Lily could feel her hand she's sure she’d be screaming as her skin scorches against the heat. But she can't. She can't feel any of it.

The roar of the thing--the fragment of the Dark Lord wearing her husband’s face--is so strong it rattles the windows, though Lily can barely hear it under her own scream. 

The silence it leaves is worse, far worse.

Lily can’t fight it. There’s not enough strength left in her to push the tears rising in her throat back down. She begins to shake, out of control, helpless, too wracked for anything other than a high-pitched prayer to escape her:  _ “No, no, no, no--” _

Pressure, then, pulling the cursed ring from her ruined finger. A voice, saying something even and measured about who that thing could not have been, about this being just another trick, but she can’t hear it with her forehead pressed to the tabletop and her tears choking her.

There are long moments of silence broken only by her shaking breaths fighting back the tears before Severus comes around to her side of the bench and kneels before her, taking both her hands in his own. The sharp angles of a stone being pressed into her unmarred hand, then, and cold fingers around hers curling around it.

“If you want to see him--the real one,” he says quietly. “The stone may still function.”

She opens her palm, trying to see the thing, but it won't come into focus through her haze of grief. She could use it, could bring him back, could explain--but there's nothing to explain. There is no one left to explain it to. He's dead, and she is dying. Severus lives and loves her and she--

Lily lets the stone tumble from her fingertips, and surges forward, into Severus’ arms, pressing her face to his shoulder and gripping the front of his robes like she is drowning. He's stiff and startled for a moment, but one arm goes around her shoulders and the other wraps her waist, holding her fast to him. Severus’ hand knits into her hair, smoothing it back and she can’t remember the last time she has felt so  _ loved, _ and so undeserving.

When she comes back to herself the shoulder of his robes is sodden and she has made a decision. “We have to do the rest of them. All of them. Now. Tonight.”


	40. The Final Piece

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My guess at 45 chapters being the end of this is definitely a guess--it very may well run to 46 or 47, depending on where the epilogue takes me.
> 
> But this is the beginning of the end.

Lily’s patronus, when she sends it to Sirius and Regulus, comes out different. Pointed. At first she thinks something’s gone wrong, that the monstrosity she’s become is manifesting; that even the innocent memory she’s chosen--one of her father and a field on a bright spring day, just the two of them--is tainted but  _ no-- _ no. 

It is the same patronus, merely--antlered.

Like James’.

Severus says nothing of it, but turns away from the starlight-bright stag. Once it’s gone, they resume work as if it was never there.

The pages of the book rustle like leaves in an unfelt wind, and then catch fire with a shrieking hiss, leaving nothing but a burnt shell of the cover.

The cup fills with blood and then cracks down the center. The blood takes an hour to scrub from the floor.

The diadem _screams_.

And when Regulus finally arrives, Sirius in tow, the locket burns, too.

James doesn't return with any of them. Any wish to have him return with any of them is crushed as far down as she can keep it. It is difficult, still, to remember that the thing she saw wasn’t James; that her husband is dead, and loved her--died loving her--and cannot know what she's done and what she has become.

Severus looks wrung out but victorious, evaluating the line of ruined and priceless things before them. Lily feels the same. Regulus and Sirius both have the same wary look in their grey eyes.

"We aren't finished," Lily says when the locket stops smoking, an ache starting in her temple. "The last. What do you have?"

Regulus opens his mouth, and then shuts it, looking at his brother.

"Your hand," Sirius says, which is not an answer. He's said it before and she'd put him off, but now he looks like he's ready to insist and Regulus is with him. "What happened?"

"A curse. Severus is working on it." Which isn’t exactly a lie, and Severus won't deny it. There is time left for it to become the truth. Lily rubs her forehead, headache intensifying. It’s a distraction from the constant ebb-and-flow of grating pain in her hand, like having a thousand ants pricking the inside of her skin. “It’s not important. We need the last horcrux, and we need it now.”

“All I have are guesses,” Regulus says, wringing his hands.

“I’ll take guesses over nothing,” Lily says.

Sirius interrupts, “We’ll have to disguise that hand. If any other Death Eater sees you’ve got a curse scar, you’re finished.”

Lily offers the dead and blackened thing mutely, and Sirius produces a length of fabric torn from his own sleeve that he wraps around her palm. Lily looks back to Regulus as Sirius works, and says, “Talk.” After a moment, she softens her tone; he’s not the enemy here. “Please, Regulus. We’re so close.”

Regulus swallows and looks to Severus, and something passes between them--some kind of permission. Then Regulus looks at the floor. “Severus and I--for the past weeks, since you stole the book from Malfoy and figured out the cup was with Bellatrix, Severus and I have attempted to ascertain under which parameters the Dark Lord rewarded his servants with the protection of the horcruxes. Lucius brought money, Ministry influence, and legitimacy to the Dark Lord’s claim, and brought him numerous followers--myself and Severus included. Those numbers kept the war in balance against your efforts with the Order.” Regulus flicks his eyes past her, delivering the rest to the ceiling. “Bellatrix--has always been a warrior. Adding the Black and Lestrange names to the Dark Lord’s cause are not insignificant, but the opponents she removed from the war were more so. And she did suffer torture for him.” There’s a breath of tense silence and Lily watches Sirius' progress in transfiguring the length of cloth to a glove, the color fading, the texture blending into skin. Then Regulus says, “There are only a few who have served him so well. Rosier, who captured Mad-Eye Moody, which led to the eventual breakdown of the Order of the Phoenix. He is also among the most loyal, as he is a second generation Death Eater, his father Dearborn being part of the original cadre. Yaxley, whose position in the Department of Magical Law Enforcement allowed him to create the Muggle-Born Registration Commission in ‘82, whose work created the status quo you see in the world following shortly thereafter, and--” Regulus looks at Severus, swallowing.

One of Severus’ thin hands spreads across his chest. “Myself.”

Sirius has finished the transfigured glove; it looks well enough like flesh, and Lily flexes her hand beneath it, then holds it up to compare to her intact palm. It looks close enough, but anyone who touched it would know. “The prophecy,” she says, voice harsh, not meeting Severus' eyes. 

“Not just the prophecy,” Regulus goes on, almost sounding excited. “Severus’ position at Hogwarts was instrumental in its fall and led directly to the death of Albus Dumbledore; that’s why--”

“I know,” Lily says sharply, and her grim look cuts Regulus off. 

“Lily, that’s why we came to you in the first place,” Sirius continues urgently, sizing up Severus before looking back to Lily, capturing her uninjured fingers and wrapping them in his own. “That, and I wanted to help you, if I could. But if anyone has the final horcrux--the one he made from Harry's death--it'd be you.”

He doesn't say _it'd be Severus_ , or even _it would be the pair of you._ He says _her._ It is less an accusation and more a hope, and Lily covers his hand with her injured one, the disguised one. It feels like leather brushing against her fingertips, not flesh, and she muscles under the sensation as best she can. “You have helped me. Both of you, more than I can possibly describe. It might be something of Severus’, perhaps, but there’s nothing from our home in Godric’s Hollow, I didn’t bring--”

“There are two items that came on your person that you still possess,” Severus says quietly. “I’m not sure where they are.”

_ Oh.  _ Lily stares at him in mute realization. Of course.

“Beneath the bed,” Lily mutters, pulling free of Sirius’ grasp and pressing both fabric and flesh fingertips into her eyelids. “If you wouldn’t mind. I’ve got the detector here.”

Severus sweeps from the room without a backward glance, and Lily wonders what she’s revealed.

When she lifts her hands from her face, Regulus is watching Sirius and Sirius is watching her. He’s working through it, leaning against a wall and looking suspicious, as if evaluating her from a new distance. Any hope of keeping the nature of her relationship with Severus a secret from him dwindles to a pinprick. Lily focuses her energies on Regulus, on using his knowledge and regaining the trust she has rightfully lost. “I don’t know if Sirius told you about this. Severus and I modified a Dark Detector,” she explains, turning to open the drawer where it's stored. “It responds only to horcruxes, but it only works for me, when I'm holding it.”

Regulus’ fretful reverie on Sirius is broken by that, and when she offers it to him he plucks it forth, bringing it to his eye. “But that should not work. That isn’t how Dark Detectors function at all. Horcruxes wouldn’t read on the detector, and modifying the enchantment to do anything that specific, you’d have to have it on a source, an example. I’m shocked Severus didn’t say--”

“Why’s it under his bed, then?” Sirius asks.

“It’s a long story,” Lily says, trying to keep her voice even.

“We’ve nothing but time,” Sirius growls, levering himself forward and moving towards her.

“I’m not sure we do,” Regulus says, looking back and forth between them both. “Considering. The curse, I mean.”

Sirius screws up his mouth but stays silent. The fight he is ramping towards is interrupted by Severus entering the room, fist extended as if he’d rather not be touching the treasure within at all.

“Here,” she says, plucking the detector back from Regulus’ fingers and moving close to the rings as Severus sets them on the bench.

Lily holds her breath and presses her thumb into the depression of the Detector, waves it close--closer--taps it against the stone of the overlarge diamond.

“Nothing,” she says, and the very air seems to sag in disappointment. No, not sag-- _bend._ Something is wrong, and it hurts deep in her skull, something is very--

The _crack_ of apparition sounds in the entry hall. Once--twice--three times, like bullets against a brick wall. It coincides with a stab of agony inside of Lily’s skull that makes her muffle a cry and weakens her knees, forcing her to catch herself on the tabletop. Sirius lets out half a noise that could be her name, but he’s too smart to let it ring free. When she opens her eyes, the diamond is glittering inches from her face before Severus’ long fingers sweep it away, into a hidden pocket in his robes, along with the Dark Detector.

“The others,” Regulus whispers, voice high, but Sirius has already pointed his wand--at first to vanish the lot, which fails. They are too enchanted and still too powerful, even broken like this. He attempts three other charms before finally sweeping them into his arms and shoving them as quietly as possible into a cupboard right before his body blurs into the familiar black dog and moves to stand at attention at Regulus’ side.

Everything is moving too fast and the waves of agony in her head, screaming infinitely louder than the pinpricks in her hand, are slowing her down too much. Lily comes halfway to her feet, soles of her shoes slipping on the freshly-scrubbed laboratory floor. She pulls her wand from her pocket, extending it to Severus across the table. There isn’t enough time to change into the proper servant’s garb--there isn’t time for _anything_ , the sound of voices and footsteps are advancing up the stair--but there is time for this, to give back her wand, to deny at least that much treason. He snatches it from her without hesitation, slipping it up his sleeve beside his own.

And then the voice calls--the high, cold voice from her worst memories, the ones she hasn’t let herself relive. “Severus,” it says, calling her friend’s name-- _her lover’s name_ \--as if it is her own when he enters the laboratory. 

The Dark Lord knows where the laboratory is, has known where it is the entire time. This house is a gift from him, to Severus. This house belongs to him. This world belongs to him.

“My lord,” he replies, and goes to his knees across the benchtop from her. Regulus does the same; only Sirius stays standing, four legged, watchful yellow eyes following the man and he sweeps into the room, trailed by two Death Eaters. The agony in Lily’s head makes it easy to follow suit and kneel, to crumple to the floor. Severus’ eyes are on the tips of his boots and his hair curtains around his face and she watches, angling her eyes beneath her lashes to watch.

There is a scuff on the the toe of the fine wingtips the Dark Lord wears. They are worn; he walks, then, he does not fly or float, not always. And a faint dusting of earth is visible on the hem of his trousers. 

He is not a god, or a demon, or an unmovable object. He is a man, and so very nearly mortal.

“Such formality,” Tom Riddle chides, and fingertips cup Severus’ sharp chin and draw it up, up,  beyond the tabletop where she can see it. “My faithful servant.”

Lily stays on her knees, eyes on the floor. Severus has taught her Occlumency--perhaps enough, _perhaps_ , but nothing is sure _\--_

“My lord has brought company. Forgive me, I am not prepared,” Severus says, smooth as silk.

“You already have company. Quite a lot of it, it would seem. But we did not send ahead, Severus,” he says. “I was very eager to see your work with the basilisk venom, as were Rosier and Yaxley here. Tell me, what have you begun? You appear to have nothing brewing.”

There is a tense, throbbing breath of silence. “I have been planning, with Regulus’ assistance,” he says. Not a lie, not exactly. “The venom is a rare ingredient, and dangerous, and it would not do to make mistakes with such a gift. I am unsure if I have thanked you enough for providing it.”

“You will when you provide its services to me,” Tom says, smile evident in his tone. “Why is your pet here? Surely you do not let her assist in such matters.”

She feels his scorching gaze turned to the back of her neck. Severus’ pet. _Herself._ Her shoulder gives an involuntary twitch and she feels everyone’s eyes rake across the movement--Regulus, Severus, the monster Tom Riddle and his two accomplices, and the dog named Sirius the only one who can look her in the eye.

“She is a servant,” Severus says, and his tone is careless. “Not unintelligent, not without her uses. My lord knows the work I have wrought upon her. She is no threat to our task.”

"Rise," the voice says with a new and chilly authority, and it stalls the breath in her lungs as she realizes that the word is meant for _her_. Regulus' knee twitches. Sirius bristles visibly before Regulus' hand descends, pressing a palm to his canine head. There is nothing for it; this death, this capture was always a possibility. Her feet go beneath her, numb, but she keeps her eyes on the floor and wraps both arms behind her back to protect, at least, that secret.

“Do you know who I am, Lily Potter?” the Dark Lord asks softly.

Harry and James are dead. One intact hand clenches the disguised and ruined one behind her back, and then relaxes. She tethers her heart to those deaths and lets everything crystalize around it, and then Lily lifts her gaze to meet his.

The face before her is handsome, but carved deeply; the cheekbones that could be beautiful gone hollow, the eyes that could be beautiful sharp and cruel. Women would have thrown themselves at him, in his youth, as the ghost she had seen in Albania. No longer. Any youth or beauty has been purged, twisted, burned away for the sake of power. Dark magic has its price, and he has paid it visibly, over and over and over again.

“Yes,” she whispers. “I know you.”

“You sound afraid,” he says, amused.

It's pointless to lie. “I am afraid.”

“Of me?” He turns further from Severus, taking a step toward her.

“Yes.”

“And why is that? --No, don't look to Severus. Look at me. Why are you afraid of me?”

Her mind is utterly blank: a frozen lake in winter. She can feel him against her consciousness, rifling through her mind with a light touch entirely unlike Severus' brutality and force. There isn't much left to be found; long dazed days in bed in recovery, dutiful and thoughtless service. Severus’ mouth moving: _do not lie to Him. You may never lie to Him and live._ Then: the carpets in Malfoy Manor, filling a glass of wine with care--but nothing more, the rest sucked under beneath the deaths she has tethered herself to. Bellatrix, laughing, and blood on the carpet, but no glitter of the gold of the cup. The dun fur of a doe. The fragrance of earth in a forest in winter, divorced from its location on the map. The sensation of a ring sliding onto her finger, but not who put it there or why. A glass full of liquor tainted with potion. And the truest thing: a traitorous wisp of Severus' cool and pale palm fisting in her hair as she moves atop him. The sound of his breath in her ear.

The sensation pauses at that memory and that one alone. And then it retreats.

_ Why do you fear me? _ There's a truth she can get away with. Perhaps once, before, but no longer. She has burned parts of his soul this day. "I don't know."

She can almost feel him inspect her words for truth or untruth. And his lip curls into what could almost be called a smile, on another face. “Interesting. Severus, is this your work upon the girl?”

Severus turns to her; the way his eyes move across her uncaring plucks at something frozen and gone just as deep as the deaths anchoring her thoughtlessness. “Perhaps. It is difficult to tell what is the result of her experiences and what is the result of my efforts.”

"Extraordinary. She is almost completely hollowed out, you know." He glides closer, and the pain in her skull thrums louder and louder, chipping away at her like an icepick. Her heart drums in her chest, the pain echoing the sound of the soles of his shoes on the floor. "But perhaps this is not your work on her. Perhaps this is… something else." He reaches out one long fingertip to trace her cheek with a gentleness he wouldn't have given him credit for, and the fingertip feels like glowing metal charring away her skin. 

Lily cannot help but flinch away at the sudden, incandescent pain.

One of the Death Eaters--Rosier, the younger one named Evan--lets out a soft laugh at her flinch. The other's face and square jaw don't move; Corban Yaxley's eyebrows twitch in surprise that she's been allowed to stay standing, to stay _alive_ after such an affront. Regulus' hand makes a fist at the back of the dog's neck, pulling at the fur. Neither of them are fools, but neither of them is willing to risk the other either. Severus' face is impassive, carved from cold marble.

Tom Riddle reads the tight line of her mouth pursed in pain like an experimental result, and then seizes her chin in his fingertips. She doesn't dare struggle or pull away, doesn't dare unclench her hands held tightly behind her back even as the fingernails of each hand digs into the other, but her lips part in a grimace and her teeth grit hard against making a sound. Lily is sure his fingerprints will be scorched into her face indelibly, and then--after a hundred years of pain or perhaps only a moment--he releases her. 

"A fascinating side effect," he muses.

A flicker of concern passes through Severus' eyes. "My lord?"

"None of your concern, Severus. You've found her satisfactory, have you not?"

“Of course,” he says smoothly. “As I have said. My lord is most generous.”

“It seems I was not misguided, though,” he muses, tilting his head. Lily wonders if he will peel back her lips to inspect her teeth. “You do have need of further assistance in your work, and you require better than this.” He dismisses her with a flick of his fingers. “Rosier and Yaxley here have expressed an interest in your experimentation, and I would like your work to be monitored more closely.” His eyes narrow, and he glances, finally, back to Severus. “To ensure no further mistakes.”

The air goes very, very still and very, very cold.

The Dark Lord moves, stepping lightly back toward Severus. “Rosier has even consented to stay for the duration of your experimentation, and Yaxley has agreed to make himself available to you as well, dawn til dusk." He nods to each in turn.

Yaxley is stonefaced, looking bored; Rosier has half a coy little smile. Regulus is no spy; he is visibly terrified and his hand is white on the fur of Sirius' neck. "My Lord," Regulus begins, voice hoarse. "I believe my assistance is sufficient for--"

"Silence," he snaps, and suddenly Lily understands the danger of being a Dark Lord, the danger of striking terror as the only tactic: he cannot tell the difference between the usual fear he strikes and this, the fear borne of true treason and the attempt to maneuver a desperate ploy to save them all and not a paltry grasp at selfish glory. 

Tom gestures to his entourage. "I have informed both Evan and Corban that they are not to harm your assistant, of course, and if you find her useful you may naturally continue to use her. And Regulus as well--though I was not aware of this collaboration. I am pleased to see you taking such initiative, Regulus.” Tom Riddle sweeps his gaze across the assembled. Regulus' eyes are fixed on the floor. Severus is still as a pillar. Lily shifts to bow her head, letting her hair fall in front of her face. "But do ensure Mrs Potter stays out of the way, and ensure she comes to no harm, or I will hold all of you responsible. Have I made myself clear?"

Herself? Out of harm? Why would his goals be aligned with Severus' own when she is just a mudblood, a reward for service, a servant herself? Unless--

"Absolutely," Severus says, bowing his head. "Thank you for your concern, my lord. Rosier and Yaxley will be most useful."

Unless--

Unless Lily herself is not just a mudblood. If she is something more, something the Dark Lord would protect, a precious object that he would instruct any Death Eater to protect.

\--No, not just any Death Eater. A trusted one. One who has rendered great service to his Lord. 

One who the Dark Lord knew already felt motivated to protect her.

Lily shudders, swallows and blinks rapidly, willing her face even, willing herself still and silent despite the roaring of her own blood in her ears. She takes one shivering breath and then another. Behind her back, her fingernails dig welts into her unmarred palm.

"You will forgive the intrusion," and it sounds more like an order than an apology. "Corban, Evan--I anticipate your reports. And your results, Severus."

The Dark Lord sweeps from the room, leaving behind the final piece of the puzzle.


	41. The Puzzle Completed

The silence in the room after the Dark Lord leaves it is complete and unbroken until Corban Yaxley clears his throat.

"Well," he says, "I'm a dab hand at potions if I do say so myself. Read up on it in the Rosier family library, once the Dark Lord set me on it, and we brought some texts you might not have, Snape. Catch us up."

The vial is half-empty and half eaten through in Severus' pocket, and they haven't so much as considered a lie. Out of her periphery, she can see the whites of Regulus' eyes flash.

"Unless, of course, you don't have one yet," Evan Rosier says, smiling unpleasantly.

"We do," Severus says smoothly. "Though I doubt you have the mind for it, Evan."

“Try me,” he says, and his smile turns more into a baring of teeth at Severus.

The moment is delicate, too delicate, it might shatter in anyone's hands like a cracked phial.

But neither of these men is the Dark Lord. They are boys playing at soldier; watchdogs left to guard the gate, and Lily cannot muster any wisp of fear of them. Not after she knows what she is, what she has to do.

“Tea,” Lily says.

Regulus is so startled at her speaking at all that he almost wilts, but Sirius’ doggy head butts against his leg, drawing him towards a seat and Regulus collapses into a chair before the bench. “Yes, please,” he says, sounding spent.

“What?” Rosier says, utterly thrown by her speaking.

“Tea,” she says again. “How do you take it, gentlemen?”

Rosier looks back between Lily and Regulus and Severus and then finally to Yaxley, who looks amused--rather like he’s just seen a parrot able to speak, or a dog walk on its hind legs. “You let her talk out of turn?” Rosier finally says, sounding bewildered and so, so young.

“As I said,” Severus says coldly. “She has her uses.” Severus draws his chair up across from Regulus.

“Strong, and with cream, please,” Yaxley says easily, drawing up his own chair. “Evan here takes it with lemon and perhaps a bit more subservience.”

Rosier is the only one standing, looking frustrated by the men around him. He glares at Lily before drawing up his own chair to the table and sitting in it with all the affect of a disappointed child.

Sirius whines as she moves toward the door and Regulus glances between them, and the old words come from him, the first words that had started all of this. “It likes the mudblood,” he explains, sounding weary. “Like attracted to like, I suppose. Go on, then.”

Lily bows her head in deference and leaves, trailing Sirius behind her. On the stair, the dog glances up at her, asking. She doesn’t turn her face, barely moves her lips, just mutters, “Not til the kitchen.”

Once she’s there, though, Sirius is human in a heartbeat. “Poison,” he says immediately.

“Don’t be stupid. He’s expecting reports,” she snaps, moving through the efficient motions of making tea over the stove without looking up. “And you’d like to poison your brother too?”

“Could knock it out of his hand,” Sirius says.

“And Severus?”

The glare returns in full force. “He brought this down on us.”

She wants to scream, to shriek  _ I brought this down on us, I started this, I put on the ring, I know what I am but that doesn't mean I'll let him die-- _ but instead the handle to the teapot snaps off in her palm and it skitters across the gloved palm, the ruined one, slicing through the disguise and numb skin both.

Lily doesn’t flinch. The blood that oozes out is ichor-black and foul and she watches it drip into the sink helplessly. There’s no pain but the persistent one, the one eating away at her, the one of the curse. “I don’t have my wand, I can’t--”

“I can do it.” Sirius lifts her palm in his own.. He false-starts more than once and the healing charm doesn’t  _ work _ , precisely; the skin doesn’t knit back together so much as ooze, and while the cut goes dry it doesn’t close. He seals the disguise over it anyway. “You’ll have to be careful, if you cut yourself and don’t feel it, you could lose a finger,” he mutters as it seals itself. “Snape had better work fast, curing that.”

_ Curing. _ Yes. Of course. Sirius doesn’t know. She’d thought it’d be written across her face, but it isn’t. Even Severus might not know, might not be able to admit to himself, might have missed it in the hard and furious work of maintaining their cover, of telling enough truth without too much.

Regulus might, though. She will have to manage him.

Lily takes a steadying breath. “And the teapot too, if you could,” she says, flexing the palm again.

“Right,” he says, rapping it with his wand-tip and smoothing his hair back. “What’s the plan?”

She pours the hot water into the pot, watching the leaves swirl. “I know what the last horcrux is,” she says finally as they begin to settle, “But we’re being watched, that much is clear. He must suspect something.”

Sirius taps his chin. “Do we take out Rosier and Yaxley now? Go on the run?”

“If we do, we’ll only have a day to act at the very outside. Maybe hours. And the Mark--I think Severus and Regulus will have to stay under cover. We would be on our own, and you heard him. I’m of value. And if he suspects what we’re doing, he’ll make more horcruxes."

"What is the last one? And where?"

Lily swallows, sugar bowl and cream in her hands. "I’ll tell you later."

Something untrusting flits across Sirius' face. “Lily--”

“We don't have time.” There is no time to explain, no time for Sirius’ inevitable grief and rage. She is thinking as quickly as she can: they must trick the Death Eaters, must sideline them without murder or raising suspicion and Sirius’ words,  _ just knock it out of his hand _ \-- “I have an idea.”

Lily explains. When she’s done, the leaves are all clotted at the bottom of the teapot, and Sirius’ eyebrows have traveled up and up and up. “Lily, that’s  _ mad. _ Even for me. _ ” _

“It’s all we’ve got. The longer they stay here, the longer they might stumble on something. It’s not as if Severus can keep them on theory forever and if they open that cabinet they’re bound to have questions. We didn’t have time to hide the spent horcruxes well enough.”

“And if it fails?”

“Better to fail when we’re trying something than waiting around to get discovered.”

Sirius looks at her darkly, but he nods, shifting back to a dog and trotting out ahead of her. Lily lifts the tea tray in her hands and follows, but doesn’t stop at the laboratory, where the voices are discussing catalyst theory. She ascends the final stair to the locked room and opens it.

The construct looks at her as if she knows what she’s about to ask. As if she’s been waiting this whole time, dressed in her own old servant’s dress. Green eyes meet green and the fear across each is the same.

“I need you,” Lily whispers to the thing that shares her face. “I have to finish this. I need you to serve them, down there, be quiet and loyal and then I’ll--we’ll be able to let you go.”

The thing looks at her, blinks once, twice, opening and closing its mouth like a fish. And then it says, “Severus?”

Lily swallows. “It’s the only way he will live through this. Voldemort--” It flinches, but Lily continues, hating herself. “He suspects. He doesn’t know everything but he suspects and it’s enough. We have to finish it."

The construct rises on unsteady feet. "Finish it," it says softly, gesturing first to its own throat and then to Lily's. "Live through this?"

It's not stupid. She wishes it were. "No."

It nods once, slowly. "Severus," it says again, and there is a softness there that Lily recognizes in herself. 

Lily offers the tea tray. “If you’re ready-- I need you to spill tea on the younger one, Rosier, and then mop it up with this napkin.” She juts her chin, indicating the paper. “I-- I’ll do the rest.”

The construct’s fingers brush against her own as it nods and takes the tray.  squares its shoulders and strides into the hall, picks its way down the stairs. Lily follows, pulling the invisibility cloak out of the extended bag in her boot and wrapping herself in it.

The voices in the lab are discussing catalysts--Rosier really, truly does not have the mind for it, but Yaxley is coaching him along like a gentle uncle. 

The construct walks in, mute as they would expect. Rosier gets his tea and his subservience, too. This much done, Lily keeps going down the stairs, beyond the kitchen, to the cellar.

Tucked in her fist there is a napkin and a knife, both taken from the kitchen. A napkin will take the note-copying charm duplix duplicis as well as parchment, and Sirius had done it the task of pairing two paper napkins while she explained the whole of the loose mess she called a plan. The mate to the napkin in her fist is tucked into the hand of the construct. There’s no expectation it’ll be able to write on it, but stain it, yes, stains will transfer just as well as script, and when the stain comes she knows the tea is spilled, and Rosier will push back, of course, and likely say something awful or even do something worse, and then--

The doe is still, sleeping, hanging from her pole. Sedated. The knife presses to her side and Lily waits, trembling, the napkin crumpled in her fist.

It takes forever. In the dark, Lily has time to contemplate each blessed breath, the rushing of her own blood in her ears. How little time there was to listen to that sound. The feel of the knife in her fist, even the pain in her ruined fingertips. All of it precious. All of it so close to gone.

“Now,” Lily breathes into the ear of the doe. “Come on. Please. Don’t make me wait any longer.”

And then a stain blossoms on the napkin, and Lily slides the knife in with something that almost feels like relief.

The doe doesn’t know to struggle. The blood gouts from the wound and Lily touches bloody fingers to the thing’s throat, feeling the heartbeat flutter once, twice, like a trapped thing, then disappear as if it never was.

Without the doe--the resonant object in place of herself--the construct must fall apart. Must dissolve into nothing but gore and screaming. It’ll ruin Rosier’s shoes.

And on cue, there is a dog, barking. Evan Rosier’s voice gone shrill; Yaxley, shouting. Good. Better than they’d anticipated.

Behind the basement door, she can hear them recriminating one another, Yaxley against Rosier, Regulus’ high-pitched worry and the heavy basso of Severus’ voice providing chorus. But they are both being hustled to the door, hustled  _ out. _

Lily creeps up to the door to the cellar, to the door to the entrance hall, and she can hear them:

“--But how will you explain?” asks Yaxley, sounding troubled.

“She  _ pushed  _ herself into me,” Rosier trills. “Or tripped or--”

“Yes, we will see if the Dark Lord accepts such an excuse,” Severus snarls.

Regulus interjects, “It’s not so bad, you see, Severus can fix it.”

Rosier can’t help himself; he’s audibly frightened. “ _ Can _ you? The Dark Lord said--”

“The Dark Lord knows the mechanics of what I have done,” Severus says. “He values the girl as she represents an experiment gone correct, and she can be replaced. Nothing has been done this day that need concern him.”

Yaxley seems unconvinced, though. “This must go in my report.”

“Your report may be delayed, perhaps. We worked late into the night,” Severus proposes. “You may report back that we spent the day on theory.”

“Please,” Rosier backs up, sounding on the edge of panic.

A breath, and then, “Very well. If the girl--or whatever that thing was--is dead and cannot be recreated, she will be just as dead tomorrow. But if by tomorrow evening you haven’t come up with a solution, Snape--”

“I already possess the solution,” Severus says easily. "I must merely do the work. For which I require peace and quiet and Regulus’ assistance."

“He’s done it more than once,” Regulus adds.

Rosier gives up a little sobbing noise and his thank-yous are messy, very messy.  And they are shooed along the way and the door is shut.

Lily waits a breath before easing the cellar door open. When she sees there are only co-conspirators in the entry hall, she pulls back the hood of the cloak.

"Brilliant," Sirius says. "Broke all the teacups, though. She thrashed as she--”

"We have purchased a day at the very most," Severus interrupts. His arms are crossed and he looks stormy; the lines between his drawn brow tell her that he’s working on it, but may not have come to the realization.

"A day is more time and more freedom than we had," Regulus says.

"I know what the last horcrux is," Lily says, a quiet finality in her voice bringing the conversation to a standstill.

Everyone is watching her. Waiting. Expectant, full of a hope Lily can't feel.

"Bellatrix--when she attacked me, she pressed the cup against my face and said something about  _ the light. _ " Lily presses a thumb into her ruined palm fretfully, and the disguise wrinkles unnaturally, entirely unlike skin. "That was how she talked about the book, too. Filthy hands snuffing out the light." She lifts her head, looks directly at Severus. “Is it possible make a living thing into a horcrux?”

Severus follows her logic, fast as he always does. “No,” he says sharply.

She turns to look at Sirius, at Regulus. Regulus won’t meet her eyes. 

He knows, then, or guessed. “It is. In theory. The side effects--”

Lily cannot wait for the explanation; she must pursue it or lose her nerve. “A possible transfer of power? If the original person making the horcrux were a parselmouth, the vessel might have the same power?”

Regulus nods along, quiet but with a certain strength. “I have suspected for a time. Ever since--you said you spoke to the basilisk.”

Severus’ eyes are burning into her own, and she advances on the clot of men before her until she is among them. “You heard him. They aren’t allowed to hurt me. No one is,” Lily continues, relentless. “Why would he care? Why would it matter?”

Sirius’ voice comes out strangled, lifting one hand as if to take her shoulder and offer comfort, but the motion is aborted as he truly begins to think it through. “God, Lily, I-- _ no. _ ”

“The only things that came here from that house is my wedding ring, my engagement ring, and me.”

“You aren’t a  _ thing, _ ” Sirius protests, but it sounds weak. He’s very nearly convinced. Severus, though--

“What happened that night, Severus?” Lily says, tone soft but hands in fists. “Did he ask for you to leave me there when he killed my son?”

He could be a statue but for his anguished eyes, full of a fight he cannot win.

“And after, he told you to keep me safe.” She ticks them off on her fingertips. “Like the book. Like the cup. A reward for faithful service. You asked for my life, which meant to him that you'd guard it with your own.”

Severus is brave. There is that mercy, at least. He holds her gaze, honest and almost wild with it. He doesn’t look away and she can’t. They both know the truth and he cannot speak it.

She wills what strength she has left into her voice, meeting each Black brother’s gaze in turn. “We know what the last horcrux is. He just told us.” She splays her ruined palm across her chest, spanning her collarbone, wishing her voice weren’t so broken and so bereft of hope. “Me.”

“Then we are lost,” Regulus says.

“No,” Lily says, hand on her front turning to a fist. “We aren’t. We destroy it like the rest.”

"How do you suggest we  _ destroy-- _ " Regulus begins, but he can't finish. "It's not as if we can pour basilisk venom down your throat."

"Why not?" Lily snaps.

The silence reigns, and it's Regulus who breaks it. "You'd die," he whispers, horrified.

Something in her face makes him blanch away.

“Snape,” Sirius says, voice sounding deadly. “You’re not going to let her go through with this.”

Severus doesn’t respond. It’s as if he hasn’t even heard. He looks as if all the blood has been drained from his body.

Lily’s soft words are for Sirius, but her eyes are all for Severus. “This isn’t about any of you. This is about my choice. About making an end. And if either of you presume to get in my way, I’ll bring you down with me. All of them must be destroyed and you’ll have to figure out how to kill him among yourselves, once I’m--”

“Stop.” It’s the first thing Severus said in long and horrible minutes and it comes out brutal, harsh, as if the word tears his throat. He lets the silence spiral longer, wider, expanding to fill the room. He presses his fingertips to his temples. Into silence, Severus says, softer now, “This is an opportunity.”

Sirius snarls out a long string of profanity and starts toward him. “I knew you were a monster, Snape, but this is beneath even you. Lily, don’t listen to him, come on, let’s go back to ours--”

Severus goes on, speaking over Sirius. “Your goal was to rip the magic or the lives from every Death Eater in order to topple the world they have built. Is it still?”

Regulus gasps. There’s no point in hiding the truth. Not anymore. “Yes. It is.” 

Sirius curses again, but she ignores it.

“This is an opportunity,” he says again, his voice gone even and flat and affectless. “We are out of time, and the conflict has been forced as I have failed him too many times. Even together we cannot hope to defeat the Dark Lord in open battle, and Regulus and I cannot trust that the Dark Lord would not be able to hobble us or even turn us against you in battle using the Mark.” He takes a breath and it’s so even it’s very nearly peaceful. He must be locking it all away, pushing it all down. She knows the feeling intimately. “But if you do, in fact, house a fragment of the Dark Lord’s soul, there is a simple way to access all the power the Dark Lord himself has access to. Even if he is not truly destroyed in the coming battle, even if you do house a horcrux that must be destroyed to complete his destruction, he will be diminished, weakened, perhaps even disembodied--it will buy us time, and destroy the systems and powers that be that he has put in place with one stroke.”

Lily’s throat goes thick with hope. “How?”

He unbuttons his cuff, rolling the sleeve, exposing the ugly black skull and snake etched on his forearm. “The Mark.” 

Regulus interjects, voice gone thin and reedy. “The Dark Mark cannot be removed. You and I both know that, Severus, it cannot be damaged or removed, not even if you remove the limb--”

“No, you’re right, it can’t.” Her reading said as much and Lily finally catches up, finally,  _ finally _ , and understands what Severus is saying. “Severus--are you saying the Mark can be tricked?” 

“Perhaps.” Severus offers his bared forearm to her as if it isn’t even part of his body, as if it--and him, all of him--is already hers. “If you are right--if you are a horcrux--the Mark may respond to you as its master.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Tiny update: apologies, but real life has been totally hammering me and I'm completely behind on this. And at such a crucial moment in the story, I don't want to just vomit up some slapdash bullshit and post it up just to keep to my weekly update. I have a draft of the next chapter but it's not quite there yet. I hope to post by Thursday (3/15/18) by the very latest. Thanks for your understanding!


	42. Marked

Sirius and Regulus depart through the Floo. The Dark Lord already knows they’ve been here and there’s no need for secrecy. They don’t say they need to put their affairs in order and plan for their own potential deaths because it does not need to be said. There are documents to destroy and trails to cover and a home they likely cannot return to even in the flush of victory. Sirius jokes that they might as well burn this house down when they leave it to make their move at dawn, just to be sure, and Lily nods, and suddenly that is the plan as well: to burn the home she and Severus have shared, the kitchen where they fought, the lab with all its half-finished work now drenched in the blood of the construct's messy destruction, the hall where the Death Eaters tracked the blood, the library where her blanket still lies wrapped around the impression of her own body, the bedroom where--

Lily wants to think  _ the bedroom where he loved her _ because it's a kinder thought than the vulgarity Sirius might put to it, if he knew. But no,  _ love _ happens wherever he goes. He carries it with him like a millstone round the neck. As does she.

When Sirius and Regulus are gone they turn to one another. Severus looks as if he’s made of stone. “We will work through the night,” he says, and turns from her before she can reply.

Almost all work is already done, in Lily’s notes on bindings, on the Mark. How it functions, how it draws magic from every man and woman who has taken it; how the spider's web of Death Eaters is all interconnected at the apex, at the Dark Lord who draws upon them. How such a draw might turn into a tear. Might rip the very magic from them. Might kill them, doing so. The issue has always been finding a way to access it, keyed as it is to the Dark Lord.  They converse in academic terms, referring only to  _ the controller, the controlled, the replacement controller _ and not  _ the Dark Lord, me, you, _ though that is all it has ever been _. _ They need only produce an hour's adjusted arithmancy, and compound an ash.

The Dark Lord's soul may be split, but it remains  _ his soul _ , and part of it resides in Lily now _. _ This very fragment of soul was even part of him, when he Marked Severus--and presumably others. If it works, not only Severus' power will be hers to draw upon; the theory indicates the Mark should serve both fragments of the soul equally, giving each equal ability to draw upon the power of all Death Eaters. And potentially their lives. If it fails--there are accounts of men who have tried to swear two contradictory oaths like this, tracing back even to the  _ conpartior lux _ . The accompanying illustrations are gruesome. Lily had stared at one in mute horror until Severus has snapped the book shut in front of her. "Acceptable risk," he said. "As it is mine, and I accept it."

"And my risks?"

He hadn't responded, merely bent once more over the Arithmancy, leaving Lily to wonder how this is going to play out.

Severus and Sirius won’t let her die, not unless she can trick or trap them into it and stay their hands. Regulus would help her do it, but he would need a plan--a real one, and a permanent solution, and he’s not fool enough to think the three of them could defeat him when Lily is gone. The ability to draw from the same well of power is too much opportunity to give up.

It’s not even a choice. Lily requires a permanent solution, carefully timed, that leaves the Dark Lord dead for once and all. No half-measures will satisfy her, even at the cost of her own life. N  The faintest candle of an idea begins to burn, and while Severus does the Arithmancy, Lily watches him write and rises to her feet.

“I need a break,” she lies. “I’ll be back in a bit.”

It takes fifteen minutes to make her final preparations in secret. When she returns to the library she says nothing, merely bends over her work. When he finds out, he’ll be furious--or worse. But she won’t suffer for it.

By midnight, there is nothing between them and attempt at tricking the Dark Mark, and Lily feels no triumph, no anticipation. Only a sick, deadened sort of hollowness in her chest.

“The process is simple. Most of what is required is--intent.” Severus is moving as he speaks, pulling down ingredients for the ash and a basin to burn them in, as if stopping will make him think too much about the implications, the task ahead. He shoves a dagger toward her, all business. “It requires a drop of your blood.”

“A drop,” Lily says, working the blade beneath the disguise in her hand, cutting away the leathery fabric Sirius transfigured to reveal her ruined hand so it can better hold the knife with more precision. It feels like getting undressed--something too vulnerable, too revealing to be done so casually. “Just one? You’re sure?”

“Yes. One from you, three from me.”

She positions the tip of the knife carefully against her thumb and presses. “I still don’t like it. It’d be safer to just give one from you. It only reduces the likelihood it would work by--”

Severus cuts her off with a glare. “No. Now stop delaying.”

They had agreed, and it was stupid to make one final push. Acceptable risk. Lily squeezes one bright droplet of blood into the bowl in his hands and looks, finally, to the drawn and severe contours of his face. “What was it like? Did he--do this? In front of you? You’d think it would give the balance of power away."

He takes the knife and pricks his fingertip, prodding it rather harder than she did her own. Three drops fall from his finger into the bowl easily, and a few more spatter the tabletop. "It wasn't--" His mouth goes thin, and there's a flash of anger, but tamps it down with visible effort. He presses the cut closed with his thumb. "It wasn't like that."

"What was it like?" And for the first time it's spoken without accusation; it's with a sincere curiosity. "I need to know."

He glances up at her once, quickly, taking her measure. "I am capable of compounding the ash without your assistance," he says finally. "Fetch the pensieve and you can see it for yourself."

When she does, the long strand of memory comes free from his temple and drops into the basin without ceremony. “This will tell you what to expect,” he says shortly.

Lily suspects it will tell her rather more than that, and he knows it. But she watches him work for only a second longer, watches him lift a dried stem of amaranth and set it alight. He drops it in among the dried snapdragon buds and aster leaves, lighting them, too. He looks up and finds her watching and she looks away, caught, before pushing her face close to the shimmering water, closer, closer, until--

It's night in the memory and night where she came from, but outdoors. The woods whisper with a chill fall breeze and Lily sees Severus--he must be eighteen,  _ god _ he looks so young--emerging into the clearing, led by a masked young man shorter but stockier than he. 

It’s strange, overlaid with her own memory of seventy-eight. They were still using masks, then. James was alive and Harry was less than a thought.

_ James. _ The thought threatens to pull her under, to pull her out, to send her spiralling. But he is not who she is here for--or he is exactly who she is here for. She locks the thought away as best she can.

“Where is he,” Severus says impatiently. He’s rubbing at his arms--he’s cold, and his coat is too thin. She hates that his coat is too thin still, even here, even in this memory.

“He’ll come in his own good time,” the guide says gruffly. If she had to make a guess, based on build and voice, she’s say the younger Mulciber, Donovan. “Or he won’t come at all because you’re just a skinny little half-blood. Either way, you’re waiting, aren’t you?”

Lily thinks that the best thing she will get to do before she dies is to rip the magic from Donovan Mulciber. For bringing Severus here to take the Mark, for making him wait for such an awful thing that he so clearly wants so very badly, for being possibly the worst person she’s ever had the displeasure of knowing between Hogwarts and here--for every reason she can think of, Lily hopes it kills him. She won't regret having Donovan Mulciber’s blood on her hands.

This younger, hungrier version of Severus looks just as furious as Lily feels, but he waits in patient silence, shifting from foot to foot and trying to keep warm by rubbing his arms. The memory blurs, shifts forward. She can’t say how long; in the way of memories and dreams, she understands time passing but does not sense it. Leaves stir, and a faraway owl makes itself known, and the moon ascends into the sky in a graceful arc, illuminating them all.

Across the clearing, a clot of shadows seizes, and the memory slows. And then, slow as water saturating a cloth, the shadows coalesce and take form, take shape, find legs and arms and a vile half-handsome face. Still half-shadow and half-man, Tom Riddle steps forward into the moonlight, towards Severus, and Mulciber drops to one knee in deference. He looks the same as he had in their lab, illuminated by moonlight, carved by ancient and dark magic--and yet, still, the ghost of a handsome young man worn like a mask. The kind of thing Severus has always wanted to be.

“Severus Snape,” Tom Riddle says, smiling, evaluating. 

Severus has stopped rubbing at his arms. He seems frozen, for an instant, and then strides forward, jerking himself free of Mulciber’s tangible radius. He looks back at Mulciber's still-kneeling figure but does not kneel himself. “My Lord.”

The wand in Tom Riddle’s hand never stops moving, pulling shadows away from his legs and hands and then allowing the cloak behind him to unfurl. It is a king’s entrance, a planned thing. “You are the one who developed that delightful curse that cuts and cannot be healed?”

“I am,” he says bravely. His spine is straight and tall and something inside of Lily is twisting, burning, hating every instant, so proud of his courage but so ashamed of who and what it’s for. 

Tom Riddle continues to circle towards Severus and toward the masked and kneeling Mulciber. “And are you the one who has brewed Veritaserum for your friends among my ranks without question?”

Severus smirks, proud. “Not without question, my lord, no. But I brewed it all the same, because I knew who it was for and why.”

“I wonder, though,” Tom Riddle says, “If you are capable of more.”

“I am,” he promises, looking hungrier than ever. “I’m capable of much more, if you’ll only--”

“I have already made my decision, Severus." The soft voice is just as effective as a shout at interrupting Severus. "You would not be here if I did not want you among my ranks. Now kneel.”

Severus blanches.

Tom Riddle sees it, and smiles. “You must only kneel once. And then never again to anyone but me.”

And what other promise than this could bring him low like this one? 

Severus sinks slowly to his knees in supplication. There's still suspicion in his eyes, but there's a greater measure of greed, of ambition, and an unquenchable hunger for power. When Tom Riddle steps close, she wants to look away, but she knows she can't.

"He has bled?" Tom asks Mulciber, not taking his gaze away from the kneeling form before him.

"He has, my lord. I made the ash myself," Mulciber says, producing a small cloth pouch and extending it up towards his Lord, who lifts it from his hands.

"Leave us, then."

Mulciber rises as if he is expecting it--he must, he has done this himself--and his footsteps crunch away in the fall air until they are inaudible and Tom Riddle stays watching and Severus stays staring up at him.

Finally, Tom Riddle says, "The price of my Mark is three truths."

Lily sucks breath through her teeth. Not three memories, or three teeth, or three of any other thing that could be returned or removed to break the bond--any of them would have done--but  _ truth _ . Making the bond unbreakable.

Severus opens his mouth slightly, lets it hang open a moment in confusion. "Is that all? My Lord?"

"That is all  _ you _ must do, Severus. But know that if is not the absolute truth, the spell will know and fail. And  _ I _ will know, and you will suffer for it." The smile Tom Riddle gives is enchanting, cryptic, as if the rest would be beyond Severus' reach until he takes the Mark. He loosens the throat of the bag and dips a finger into the ash there, rubbing it between his fingers. "Give me your left arm."

Severus fumbles with the cuff of his sleeve and shoves it roughly up. He extends his wrist without hesitation, and the Dark Lord wraps one long-fingered hand around it. The fingertip, darkened with ash, hovers above the bare skin where the Mark does not yet reside. "Begin. Your first truth, Severus."

"I want to fight for you," Severus starts on, fast, sure of himself. "And I’m valuable. I have talents that your organization does not yet possess, Dark magic I have developed myself, you’ve seen--"

Severus is interrupted with a rapid intake of breath in pain. The Dark Lord's fingertip draws one jagged line across his forearm, crossing the blue veins there. The ash burns bright, a dark flame flickering, and it must burn, the way Severus’ breathing hitches.

"The first truth," the Dark Lord says, visibly pleased at the result. "Now, a second."

Severus swallows, but continues, more hesitant this time. He hasn’t prepared this, but he’s quick enough on his feet. "I am a half-blood. My--my mother is a witch--barely magical--and my father is a muggle.” He takes a steadying breath, looking up into the Dark Lord’s face. “I despise them both."

Another bright burning line of flame draws across his arm, this one expected, but no less painful for it. "As it should be, Severus," the Dark lord intones. "And the final truth?"

And here, Severus  _ smiles. _ It's a cruel, cold thing, and this one is prepared as well, ready, an exchange. "You have a spy in your midst. Benjy Fenwick. He has been hanging about several of your Death Eaters, trying to curry your favor through them, all while feeding information to an organization called the Order of the Phoenix, which seeks to resist your work."

And Benjy died, Lily remembers. There wasn't even been enough of him left to bury in a teacup, let alone a casket. 

If there really is love in her heart for this creature on his knees making an oath to the man who murdered her husband and son--it is poison. It is an ownership that recognizes that snake and skull tattooed now on his arm more than his soul--a litmus test that proves that this will work, could work. It's nothing else. Nothing. Nothing. It can't be anything else.

The Dark Lord pauses, clearly surprised. "Fascinating," he says, drawing the third and final line. "How did you come by this?"

"Overheard," Severus gasps, still in pain and drawing his arm back to his chest but following Tom Riddle’s movement with his eyes. "My Lord. I met him--with the others--and I suspected. I followed him, and he left a note in the knothole of a tree. A note which the Auror Longbottom came to fetch not an hour after."

"Indeed," says Voldemort, pushing up his sleeve. "I thank you, Severus. And now, in exchange, I offer you one truth of my own." He dips his fingertip one last time into the ash and then lets the satchel drop to the ground with a soft puff of powder. Fixing Severus with his eyes, the Dark Lord says, "I killed my muggle father and my witch mother both. I am free myself from the failure in their blood. You will do the same, I think.” His face splits into a smile. “A truth, and a gift." 

With his fingertip he draws a single long line, elbow to wrist, on his own pale skin, and it burns, too. He seizes Severus elbow while the flames smolder, pulling Severus' hand to his own upper arm, like some kind of brother's handshake that presses their forearms together and reignites all the other ash on Severus’ own arm. The sound of pain that slips through Severus’ teeth makes is ice in her heart. 

It only lasts a moment, though. When it’s over, the Dark Lord frees him and Severus is released to the forest floor, gasping.

"You knelt as Severus Snape," Voldemort intones with all the weight of a ceremony that has been performed many times. "Rise, my Death Eater."

And Severus does, staggering slightly, the familiar skull-and-serpent inked on his arm below the smudged ash. He looks more proud and triumphant than she's ever seen him in his life.

\--Lily comes up from the memory feeling sick. She watches the bowl, watches the Dark Lord and the man before him swirl away into the silver mist, and then looks up.

This older version of Severus, the one she knows now, looks pale--paler than usual, and just as sick as she feels. He knows what she has seen. What she must feel.

There's a thousand questions competing for space in her mouth, dominant among them  _ why, why, why-- _ but it answers itself, that look of hunger he knelt with, the look of triumph he rose with. Lily knows why.

"All right," she says finally, helplessly. "I know what to expect." 

Severus  extends the bowl with their own ash in it wordlessly and Lily takes it from his hands. 

Then he kneels before her, and it's both like the memory and not. 

He's not a supplicant this time. No--she has asked  _ him _ for this and this is him, giving in, acquiescing. It's a grotesque parody of a proposal, Lily sees suddenly, overlaid with James, one-kneed, looking up with hope. The memory burns inside her traitor heart, and try as she might to douse it, she can’t--she breathes in and her lungs are full of the smoke it makes. How full she’d felt then, as if her heart was a cup filled to overflowing. She tries to blink it back, exhaling sharply to push it out of her. 

It only works by half, but at least she can see the man who is, still, before her. He is watching it play across her face--the memory, the pain. Perhaps not what it is for, not so specifically, but who--that would never be in question.

“Sorry,” she says, scrubbing her sleeve across her face like a child.

He nods, smoothing his hands down his thighs, then lifts his wrist toward her.

She dips her fingers in and feels the grit of the ash between her fingertips, rougher than she had anticipated. Lily takes a deep breath, and then another, steadying herself, pushing away her grief, her twinned attachment for the dead man in her heart and the living one before her. It’s like bailing a ship full of holes, but she does it anyway. "Are you ready?"

“Yes,” he says. 

He closes his eyes when she takes his wrist in her ruined hand, and when he opens them again they are fixed on her. Prepared, this time. “I will dedicate every effort I am capable off to your goals. To the destruction of the Dark Lord and the world he has built.”

Which stops her heart but not her fingers. His wrist is in her hand, but the magic draws her forward, dragging her behind it. She can sense it, this thing that has been put inside of her, pushing close like a child's face to the glass of a window. It is a hungry thing, and it, more than she, draws the first glowing line across the throat of the snake. It shimmers, a keening thread of magic stitches them together, closer, like a hook anchored in his jaw.

It's working. It must be working.

“If I could,” he says, through the pain. “If I could, were I capable, I would bring back your family. I would give them to you whole and alive once more. No matter the cost. I would give them back to you if I could.”

The silence is awful, and she almost forgets herself. Her fingers tremble over the Mark, but her fingers know the way, she is barely in control of them. The thing inside Lily draws it, the second line. The bright hum of magic makes her teeth hurt as she does it, but it must be much worse for him--it burns, and he gasps. 

Which means it’s the truth. Her heart is in her mouth.The truth, again, paid for in pain.

She hates it. She hates the pain it causes more than anything else she is capable of comprehending. Her focus is winnowed down to a point--less than a point. And for a moment, both of them merely rasp in and out breaths as best they can. A surge of fierce warmth, something full to bursting, runs through her like lightning. It's not drawn from anywhere but inside herself. Her traitor heart, the only thing left of her, beating a borrowed melody.

She knows what the final truth will be before he even speaks. She knows the pain it will cause him here is nothing, nothing in comparison the pain it has caused him before. And she knows how to answer it.

“I have loved you,” he says finally. His glittering eyes are fierce and fixating. “More than half my life, I have loved you, and I would never deserve--”

She draws the line across his arm before he can finish--before he can turn it into a lie, before he can speak of what he believes he doesn’t deserve. 

Her truth is both a gift and a curse. 

"You don’t deserve it," she says, voice trembling, on the verge of tears, fingertip covered in ash hovering above the crook of her elbow. “But I love you anyway.” 

And she draws the final line, elbow to wrist, past where the curse took hold and ruined her, and takes Severus's arm against her own. The blackened skin of her hand stands stark against his pale skin. She pulls herself down to him, cradling their arms between their bodies with all the gentleness she has left inside of herself. 

The magic between them feels like a riptide that will drown them both. She doesn't feel the pain of this thing they've done but the way Severus shakes against her, he must feel it for them both. She wraps her free arm around his back to press him close, pillowing her head on his shoulder. The magic binding them hums between their bodies, and she finds her mouth pressed to his throat and his spine curling around her.

His breath is ragged when the fire dies. His hand rises from her shoulder, pulling itself down her hair, down her spine. His fingers of his other hand tighten, momentarily, before prising themselves free as if against his own will. She pulls back and looks into his face.

He looks drawn, pale, weakened, and his eyes are only for his forearm as he rotates it free of the ruin of her fingers. There, the Mark is blurred, stretched--torn straight down the center with something paler than his skin, tight and shining like a healed scar. Not  _ gone, _ never gone, but--changed. She can feel it. 

And inside her, a spiderweb of possibility. A hundred other wells of power she can draw from. All the power the Dark Lord wields, hers to command.

None of it matters half so much as the man before her.

“I can’t tell,” he says absently, voice gone hoarse, staring down still. “I can’t--”

“It worked,” she says, with a certainty she presses to him with her fingers, “I feel it.” And she pulls his mouth down to her own.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter really wrestled with me, and the next is too. I can't tell if it just isn't up to snuff or if I'm just bad at ending things--likely a bit of both--but there you are. I'm endeavoring valiantly to keep updates regular but I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it takes me 2 weeks to get through the next few chapters. I've got a big chunk of things written but I need to make sure they all still work, and mesh them into a real chapter.


	43. Four Vials

The heavens could have opened and expelled a procession of devils past them both and Lily would not have noticed or cared. Which means it’s Severus who pulls away, saying her name under his breath once, twice, stroking his knuckles past her cheek.

They are still kneeling there on the floor, in a kind of lover’s embrace--her cursed fingertips curled against his cursed Mark, so well matched now they might have been made for each other.

Or perhaps remade. They are a thousand miles from the innocent children who met on a playground so long ago, or even the people they were a few years ago. He is no Death Eater. She is no wife.

“Lily,” he says a third time, and she comes back to herself.

She takes a shuddering breath and shuts her eyes tight for a moment to stave off the feeling that is even now clawing its way up her throat. "You know what we have to do now."

"No--"

"You  _ know. _ We don't have a choice." Lily traces an absent fingertip down the jagged scar through the Mark. She could fall asleep in his arms right now, but there is no time for it. "This will hurt. Terribly. It may kill you, even without meaning to."

His voice is icy, shocking in comparison to the whispered tenderness before, and his hand around hers goes stiff, almost clenching into a fist. "I am aware."

"Are you?"

"I am not a coward."

"I know." Her brain feels thick, buzzing, half-dead, but she considers what he’s saying, why it can still surprise her so. "I just thought you had more self-preservation than this. More--that you valued your magic. That you valued your life."

"I do." A shadow of confusion moves across his mouth. "You know I do."

It still doesn’t track. "I would have thought if you did, you'd put up a fight."

His voice is cold, utterly, shifting back towards insult. "I'm not afraid to die."

"I am." It slips out so easily for a feeling Lily hadn't even let herself consider, and it all slips into place; the weight of her private plan for the end, a weight she must bear alone. It’s strangling her. "I'm terrified." She slips her hand from his and covers her eyes in shame, and then moves it to her mouth as if to hold back anything further, anything that would let him stop her. "I'm so scared, Severus, I can barely breathe."

"You won’t--" He can’t even say it. His voice is on the edge as much as hers is, and he grasps her shoulders. “Not alone,” he says, with a fierce willingness that breaks her heart. 

He’d give everything if she only let him.

They are both wishing. One might as well wish differently. Wish better. Wish another world entirely. She doesn’t know how to answer, doesn’t have it in herself to lie, so instead she presses her face back into his throat. He bows his head to press to her shoulder, and his hand tangles in her hair again. His thumb rubs little circles on the back of her neck beneath the collar of her shirt, and it’s no seduction--it’s comfort, and it makes something in her chest ache like a sucking wound, love like a knife sunk deep. In this moment of weakness, Lily wonders if she could have stayed here. If she could have fallen in love with him here, locked away from the violent world, could have let everyone else burn and been loved like this forever.

No. She couldn’t. But it’s a pleasant dream to indulge, all the same.

The owls have all gone silent in the trees outside the windows, which means soon enough the morning birds will begin their chorus. Dawn is no more than an hour away. She has stolen enough moments, and they will have to last. “I’m ready,” she murmurs, lips moving against his skin.

Pulling away from him now is like pulling a knife from her own chest. He rises with her, his hands trailing her motion like he doesn’t know what to do with them without her to guide them.

The cabinet behind them still holds all the destroyed horcruxes, in the jumble where Sirius shoved them.The ring is among them: the Resurrection Stone, set in a melted slag of gold. But it still fits on her ring finger. It’s selfish, but she slips it onto her finger anyway. “Is there anything else to keep?” she murmurs over her shoulder.

He cast his eyes around himself, as if suddenly realizing for the first time that everything--this house, his allegiances, all the power and secrecy he’s gathered around himself--is so flammable. “No,” he says. “There’s nothing.”

This is the man she loves, and it shows on her face. “The pensieve,” she prompts carefully, setting one portion of her plan in motion. “If you can carry it.”

He nods brusquely and moves to the door. Exactly as she’d hoped.

When she hears him go up the stair, she thinks of the way he’d looked at her not moments ago, like she was an untouched thing in a sea of oncoming flame. The patronus comes to her wand antlered but easy. “For Regulus. Only when he’s alone,” she says to the starlit stag before her. 

She explains her plan carefully, fast, under her breath--he’ll only be gone a minute, but it doesn’t take so long.  The stag’s solemn eyes close once, and then it leaps away, beyond where she can see. Lily takes a steadying breath, and then another. She checks the four necessary vials in her pockets: one with water, spelled closed and without a cork; one she filled last night when she crept away while Severus worked; one shattered and repaired a dozen times until the glass appears nearly opaque with refracted light; and the final one, a simple and instant poison from Severus’ store.

When Severus comes back into the room moments later--the pensieve must already be shrunk in his pocket, which saves her asking him to do it--Lily is ready. She offers her ruined hand, the one wearing the Resurrection Stone. “Together?”

He doesn’t hesitate. He laces his fingers tight through her own, so tight it would hurt if she could feel it properly. “Together.”

On the front steps they stand hand in hand. There is no need for invisibility. They feel more than see Sirius and Regulus at their sides on the front steps, precisely when they arranged, just as the sun barely begins to crest the horizon.

It all feels like it’s going too fast, like the moments are slipping through her fingers. But there is nothing she can do to slow down time, no way to reverse it. Lily holds Severus’ hand as tight as she can, weakened as it is, and lifts her wand. It is the exact opposite of casting a Patronus. She musters all her rage, all her despair, the entirety of the fight that she intends to finish, and speaks the first part of the end into being.

Pulling from the Mark is entirely unlike using her own magic. It’s like seeing the ocean for the first time, or being swept away in a river. And she is the waterfall the river leads to.

A rope of fire lashes out from her wand. At first it is merely fire, licking at the door, bursting through a window and catching the curtains. But it doesn't remain mere fire. She pulls again at the connection, and more flows, a dam crumbling, a rushing sense of speed and intoxicating power. The fire rises, gains strength, movement, darkness. Half-formed animalian shapes begin to emerge from the flames as they grow to an unnatural height. She hears Severus' intake of breath next to her.

She looks at him. Plucked from the foremost part of his mind, she sees herself as he sees her: lit by fire, face harsh and carven in transparent rage and despair, hair buoyed by magic, eyes bright and alive with vengeance. The word arrives unbidden, as if placed there at the fore of his mind for her to read--

_ Beautiful. _

Lily turns to Sirius, and his face is grim, set, but his gray eyes are unsure. His wand is up but she knows him well enough to know that he's looking at the biggest threat in his line of sight, and he's looking directly at her. Lily doesn't have to take anything from his mind at all; his face says it:  _ Terrifying. _

Good.

She does not look to Regulus. She knows what he is thinking. She knows what he knows, what he will do.

Lily lifts her wand higher, coaxing the Fiendfyre up and summoning it closer, pushing it before her, and it forms a stag, tossing its sharpened horns before her. And then she releases it, and it  _ leaps, _ the scream of unleashed fire terrible to hear. It races through the walls and the roof collapses. Nearby homes catch blaze, and it wheels for another pass.

It’s the most beautiful thing she’s ever seen. This is how people die of Fiendfyre, she realizes. It doesn't give chase. It seduces. She could walk into it and end it, right here and now, let the rest of them clean up the mess, let the Dark Lord fall some other way--let the world left behind manage or burn on its own as she steps into a flaming oblivion.

_ Only a little longer, _ she promises herself. 

There is another hand twined in her own, fingers coiled tight, anchoring her here. And then she warns herself with the same words, running her thumb along the length of Severus’ finger clasped against her own.  _ Only a little longer. _

They Apparate as a group to the designated spot, the last of spring frost crunching beneath their boots. The dawn illuminates the castle like a promised place, pouring gold and pink across the stone parapets, glittering across the lake like gemstones cast from the hand of a careless god.

But beautiful does not mean  _ good. _ It is the Dark Lord’s ancestral seat, after all, Chamber of Secrets and basilisk and, greater than both, true emblem of his supremacy. As his seat, it protected him as it had all the children who has come through its doors without bias, without prejudice, without protecting any of them enough.

Lily finds herself watching the way the light moves across Severus’ face, and is caught out staring. And the dawn glitters there, too, in his dark eyes.

She looks away before he can read what’s next, and expels a breath. “All right. It’s time.”

Lily turns to Regulus and, as she does, the spell spirals out of her wand easy and silent. Severus goes rigid and starts to fall, bound as he is in invisible rope. "Take him," she orders, and Regulus catches Severus' upper arm before he can topple.

Regulus, for his part, is just a fraction too slow with his attentions divided between catching Severus and taking Sirius unawares. Sirius twists, deflects, curses loudly--parries another, a third--but Lily catches him and sends him sleeping from behind on the fourth, and she catches him before he can fall.

"Take this," she says lowering Sirius to the ground and drawing the invisibility cloak from hidden satchel in her boot where it has been for weeks. "You need to get to safety. It’s an invisibility cloak, used to belong to James. Now it’s yours. Keep it safe. And this--” the first of the four vials from her pocket. “It’s just water but there’s no stopper, just a sealing charm, one I cast. When you can pour it out, you’ll know--" She swallows, convulsively. “You know how it works, when someone dies?”

Regulus opens his mouth and then closes it, giving a single jerky nod.

“If the spell doesn’t fail within half an hour, go to the Potter Estate as I said, Frank will help you flee. If it does, come and confirm, and then go to Frank. Mariposa and Septimus sent you either way.”

Regulus lowers his brother and his friend to the ground. When he looks up at her, there’s a pain there. “Lily--”

Lily will not be argued with, not now. "If any of you stay, you'll die. You've seen me this far. No further." She extends the cloak and vial again and gives Regulus a searching look.

Regulus looks to the cloak, to her face, and then extends his hand. The cloak slithers from her hand to his own. “Severus will never forgive me,” he says, defeated.

“No,” she says. “I don’t expect he will. But take this for him anyway.” 

The second vial is whole, stoppered normally, full of a softly glowing fluid that moves independently of the vial’s motion. It is labeled  _ an antidote _ in Lily’s own hand. Regulus holds it to the light, turning it to and fro, and the silvery mist inside glows as it catches the morning light. He glances at her, knowing who it is for, what it appears to be--and putting together that it is a kindness not to be questioned. 

Squaring his shoulders with quivering bravery she’d never given him full credit for, Regulus looks her in the eye. “Do whatever you have to do. If it burns the magic out of me, then--that is what is needed.”

Lily nods, sharply, once, looking away across the grounds. “Thank you. Now go. He’s coming.”

Regulus nods once, sharply and crouches to take hold of Sirius’ sleeping figure and Severus’ paralyzed one. And then they are gone, twisting away into nothing as if they’d never been.

"Goodbye," she says to the empty air. She'd say her heart is breaking but there is nothing left to shatter.

The shadow, she can feel, is moving. It’s coming, but it’s still a distance away. She has the time for the thing she has wanted.

Lily removes the half-melted ring from her finger. It shines just like Severus’ eyes do in the sun. What she is about to do is selfish, but the dying are allowed a last indulgence. She has earned this much, at least. She has paid for it, will pay for it with her life.

Lily closes her eyes, and turns the Resurrection Stone over in her fingertips three times.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm pretty sure all of these are going to be difficult chapters right up til the end. But I did manage to make this happen in two weeks, and I think that's the deadline I'll set for myself for the next too. I hope this doesn't feel like a cliffhanger? It kind of is. Kind of.


	44. To Make An End

When Lily opens her eyes, she is still standing in the clearing where they Apparated. But before her, in the tall grass and underbrush leading up to the semicircle of trees, stands a door that was not there a moment ago. It is soft and indistinct and so familiar, the outline trembling in time with the ring in her hands, carving a sliver of tree-lined reality away in its stead just for her.

The door is ajar, and when she steps toward it, the brush parts before her like a crowd of onlookers. She reaches for the doorknob and the door swings open of its own will to welcome her in. It's the nursery--her nursery--she painted the walls this color, picked out the crib, the mobile, the blanket, her stomach huge and James' hand in her own.

The nursery isn't empty. It's so full she might burst.

His back is to her. She's almost glad of it, that she can take him in partially before seeing his face, before everything that comes along with seeing his face might give her. The back of his neck is dark with sun and his hair is a mess, half-flattened and half sticking straight up, as if he's just woken from a nap. He's putting the baby down, making soft shushing sounds and gently rocking him back and forth in his arms. He was always better at that than her, always willing to share the burden of parenthood, always a good father, a good man, better than she deserved--

"James?"

He turns, smiling. "I've almost got him down," he murmurs over Harry's mess of black hair. "I'm so glad you've come."

A rope is coming unknotted in her chest, the cord that was supporting the terrible weight of the anchor she has been lashed to, but the feeling of rising from that weight might kill her too. "James, you're--"

"Dead, I know. No reason not to be here for you, though. You've been absolutely brilliant." He looks down, freeing a finger to adjust his glasses, and then lowers the infant into the crib.

The Stone digs in to the skin of her unscarred hand, and she steps closer. Lily can't tear her eyes away from the sleeping child. He’d be four now, but he isn’t. He’s still the same toddler he was when he died. His hands are tiny, chubby fists. Her blackened hand clutches the rail of the cradle so hard it trembles. She lets go for fear of waking him. She shakes her head, trying hard to hold it all back, to keep it all in. If she speaks, it'll all come pouring out.

"You don't have to feel guilty, you know. About any of it." James comes around behind her and gently,  _ god, _ gentle as he always was, with his hands entirely unlike the hands she has become accustomed to, sliding around her waist. His lips press to the back of her neck. He murmurs against her hair, "You did what you had to do to survive, Lily. You've been so brave. You've fought so hard."

She tries to choke back the first sob, but it only makes the second shake her harder. Her face is wet and the tears drip from her chin into the crib, next to the sleeping child. "I didn't have to love Severus. I should have loved you, only you and--and Harry."

His hand--unscarred, beautiful, deft and gentle and  _ gone _ \--wraps gently around her broken and blackened one. "There's nothing to forgive. We're gone. We've been gone." He steps beside her, next to the crib, so he can watch her face. "You can stay, if you want. Let someone else finish it." He runs his thumb across the charred knuckles as if it's the hand he remembers. Perhaps it still is, somewhere beneath the ash.

"Do you want me to stay?" she whispers.

"We can't want anything," he murmurs, brushing her hair back from her shoulder. "What do you want?"

The question is a spiralling void, and she grips James' hand so fiercely she's afraid she might hurt him. But she can't. He's dead. And that's what she needs to know, more than anything.

"I still want to finish it. I still want to save everyone, to save--to save Severus. Even after everything, I still--" she chokes, turning her face away. "You must hate me for it."

“Lily,” he chides, half a laugh in his voice under the whisper. "I couldn’t. Never."

The tiny mobile above Harry's crib begins to rotate, gently, tiny broomsticks and snitches and stars above him. It takes more revolutions than she would like to get control back enough to speak. Her voice is rough, gasping at those words she's just said, to another man in another place. "I love you."

When James says it back, it's nothing like a knife. Lily had forgotten there was love in the world that had no blade tucked into it, no sharpness, no guilt and ownership anywhere. She can feel the words vibrating his chest, his throat. It is all she has wanted to hear for three long years: love, and forgiveness.

It is enough.

When the black stone drops from her fingers, she is standing in the underbrush of a forest once more, and another man is there--one she has felt approaching, felt like a shadow across the sun growing nearer, a creeping mist around her ankles. His eyes are on her, boring into her skin.

Lily takes her wand from her pocket and banishes the ring. There will be no more speaking with the dead. No Severus wasting away before this stone. The glinting gold thing lifts up and soars away into the trees.

Lily feels Tom Riddle tug at the magic strung between them, and the wand flies out of her fingers. She doesn't resist it.

Lily can feel him wondering what it was she sent away from them--a message? A tool? But it is gone now, and there are more important things to discuss. He dismisses it and says, "Did you send your compatriots away? I had hoped it would be a real fight."

Lily turns. “Was it Yaxley or Rosier?” she asks.

“I should kill you where you stand.”

Severus’ mouth moves in her memory:  _ he cannot be lied to. _ She has kept him out of her memories in desperation, but there is no reason to tempt fate. There is one last move to the plan, and a lie is thing he can win with. 

She tells the truth. “You won’t. I’m too valuable to you." It's not said coyly; it comes out flat, free of affect, an undeniable fact. "Yaxley or Rosier?”

The creature who was once Tom Riddle tilts his head, and then--deciding visibly to be amused--he smiles. “Yaxley, naturally. He said it was Rosier’s mistake. It is useful to sow dissent and mistrust even among the loyal. But perhaps you have guessed that much.” He begins to move closer, a snake sliding through the frosted grass. "And you are correct, I would prefer not to kill you. I believe I may have underestimated you, Lily Potter.”

“You have.” And if she’s very lucky and very smart, he won’t realize how badly until it’s too late. “I have something for you.”

He goes on as if she hasn’t spoken, gesturing benignly with her wand and his own, one in each hand. “What can you possibly offer me that I do not already possess?”

She extends her unscarred hand: in it, the third vial, the one so shattered it catches every fragment of light, looking like smoked glass, shattered and repaired and shattered in repaired with the wand in his hand. “This is for you. From Severus, and from myself. It is what we have been working toward together for months.”

And none of that is really a lie.

“The basilisk venom,” he guesses, and she nods, swallowing--also not a lie. “And something else, I can hear it in your voice. Is this a peace offering? Surely you know a potion, no matter how clever, will not buy your freedom or his life.”

“I know,” she says.

Tom Riddle gestures broadly, the bemused smile becoming sharp. “Then what is this? A request for clemency?” He’s only a few steps away, now, but he halts. “A request for this?” He tucks his own wand away and holds up hers.

Lily bought her wand when she was eleven, Severus at her side. She was astonished at every beautiful thing in Diagon Alley, but her wand was the most beautiful. When the gold sparks had fallen from the tip it had been a miracle, Severus’ promise made under the treetops kept. When she won it back from Severus so recently, it had performed exactly as it had before: easy and joyful and strong, the way magic should be. 

Lily knows what he’s going to do before he begins, and her fingers close over the vial convulsively, but she doesn’t draw her hand back. She watches the willow wood gleam in the dawn light for a moment before the Dark Lord places the tip in his other hand. The wood bends, and bends, and bends--

It snaps like a twig. 

She would rather he had broken one of her own bones.

“I am not so crude as to break your bones for my own pleasure,” Tom Riddle says, catching onto the power and pain of that thought and casting her broken wand aside. “I hope you understand that this is not personal. I am merely correcting an error in the judgement of my servant.” He closes the distance between them. His own wand moves and an inexorable force pries her fingers back open, and Tom Riddle--Lily’s breath catches in her throat--plucks the vial from her palm and holds it, opaque glass glittering, to the light. “But I will take what you have brought me all the same. Perhaps to end Severus’ life with.” And with an ease she had not dared hope for, he tucks the vial into the breast pocket of his robes, just above his heart.

It is all she needs, and better than she’d dared hope. Her scarred hand goes to her pocket for the final vial, to complete the end she has planned. She thinks of Harry and James and then, shielded by them, the poison she has chosen. It is quick, sure, and painless. It is one of Severus’ own design. It is fitting, Lily thought when she filled the vial. The poison for Beauxbatons started all this; another poison should end it. And hidden in the very heart of her Occluded mind, she knows it will not hurt so much as the venom will hurt Tom Riddle, nestled where it is in his breast pocket. She takes comfort in that, at least. 

Before her fingers can dip into the fabric of her pocket, Tom Riddle grasps her wrist and lifts it to the light. The pain of their contact is deaded by Severus’ work to contain the curse, but it burns still with a faraway kind of ache.

“A curse scar,” he says, his voice growing suspicious. “One of my own design. Tell me, where did you acquire such a curse?”

Somewhere in his mind, the golden thing, flying away from her. Was there a glint of black inside of it? Could it have been--

She tugs her wrist--once, twice--but his grip is firm and the curse scar has weakened her. Magic sparks from her fingertips. At first just futile half-efforts, weakened and unfocused without her wand, but it cascades. Like an overflowing cabinet, the magic falls through her. Lily has the upper hand for the moment out of sheer surprise at her resistance, and Lily does not care if magic is ripped free of the Death Eaters. No--it is more than that--she knows Regulus will understand, knows Severus would willingly give her his power if he could. She pulls harder than Tom Riddle is willing to, drawing more magic between them.

She can feel his suspicion grow, and finally there is a thin thread of fear strung between them. His eyes bore into hers, searching for something so specific it flies past her plans, past the poison, past the trap she has set--

Everything lurches, seizes, trying to serve their two conflicting desires: his to grasp and hers to pull free. It contorts, shifts, struggles, each of them pouring more and more strength into their efforts, so much it begins to warp the air like heat rising from pavement in summer. It’s hurting every Death Eater, somewhere out there--she knows, she can feel them shaking with it. It might be hurting them terribly. She can feel the spiderweb of power crumbling, points of contact flickering, Marks going out--

Tom Riddle, clawing through her mind, finds what he has been looking for: the gold of the ring, slipping onto her finger. His horcrux, its curse, the Resurrection Stone.

But that leads straight to James, and Harry, and her ironclad will, and that is all the opening she needs. Lily shuts the nursery door on him. She will not allow him to pollute that for her, not here, not now. With all the will inside of her and a surge of energy so strong it warps the air around them, Lily pulls her hand free. Tom Riddle stumbles back, his fingernails leaving oozing tracks in the half-cursed flesh of her wrist. 

Lily can’t be sure if he knew it before, but he knows now that she draws magic from the same deep well as he. And--she can see it, she can hear it inside his mind--suddenly her life is not so valuable anymore. Not when compared to the uncontrollable danger she represents.

Her fist closes around the vial in her pocket, but he is faster, has more practice wielding this kind of power, and her advantage in surprise is spent. When he slashes at her with his wand, roaring in fury, there is no defense: Lily feels herself flying before she can even try to pull up a wandless reflecting charm.

All the breath comes rushing out of her on impact with the tree, fifty paces away from where she stood. Something snaps, sickeningly, inside of herself; another rib broken badly, maybe more than one, but it doesn’t matter, can’t matter, the pain is someone else’s and belongs to another body, another life. Her wrist is at a funny angle and the bones grind as she struggles to pull the vial from her pocket with numbed and scarred fingers.  _ Not broken, please, not broken-- _

It’s whole, and full, and Lily pushes her feet beneath herself.

When Lily first understood death as a child, she had thought it would happen to her the way it happened her grandmother: it would come in peace, while she was surrounded by her family and so loved it could not be named a tragedy. During the war, that dream burned; every day was a gasping miracle, every battle they escaped alive a triumph so bright and bubbling she could pour it in a glass and toast with it. After James and Harry died, death had been her constant companion--a secret doorway in every room, a circling vulture. The memory charm had shot that bird from the sky, and that had been the entire point. After the charm broke, she had only sighted it once more, in Severus’ arms. And in that moment she had chosen life and him in its stead, no matter how much pain it brought her. 

Now, the gulf between simply dying and dying for something is an ocean she has crossed, and this is no suicide. She can die on her feet and proud, protecting the world she loves and the man still alive to live in it.

The man who calls himself the Dark Lord is stalking through the underbrush where the nursery was toward her, speaking something foul-- _ perhaps I shall transfigure you into the dagger I will slit your filthy half-blood lover’s throat with-- _ but she can’t hear it, can’t muster fear for him anymore. Nothing he says or does matters. Everything is in place. Lily has the time and the tools she needs to make the end she has wanted, to use the weapon she has carved from her life.

Lily thumbs the cork from the vial and lifts it to her lips. The sun glints through the crystal and Lily’s movements are smooth, precise, unhesitating as she drinks it down. The poison is sweet on her tongue, sweet as cold water in summer, sweet as a kiss, sweet as falling in love, sweet as a sudden weakness that pushes all the pain from her body and the weightlessness of falling--

.

.

.

Lily Potter is dead before her body hits the ground.

A man who calls himself the Dark Lord breathes deep once, twice, in triumph. The woman crumpled to the ground in the brush where he's going her had chosen an end, perhaps, more merciful to herself, but why? Surely she had known that any life at all was better than--

His hand presses to his breast pocket, where he has felt something shatter with a chime of broken magic. The hand comes away bloody, and hissing with the steam of dissolving flesh. 

When a wizard or a witch dies, all the magic they have wrought goes slack, like a cut thread. And Lily had shattered the vial and repaired it over and over and over. It does, truly, contain the last of the basilisk venom. One drop had been enough to destroy some of the most powerful dark magic of the age. This quantity is enough to destroy entire city.

It is more than equal to the task that Lily has left for it.

The venom is so corrosive it has eaten through his robes before he has even noticed and has begun to work upon his skin, turning it to lace and sheeting his front with blood. His wand twitches once, twice--two instinctive countercurses that do nothing, and the momentary impediment of ribs are eaten away, leaving it to ravage the softer flesh within. He stumbles, crumples, tries to inhale to howl or speak another spell but finds himself with nothing left to draw breath with. It takes only moments to burn straight through him to the grass beneath his body, searing the shape of him--the last mark he would leave--into the dirt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've written the last two chapters; they are rough and in need of editing but they are written.
> 
> And, if it's worth anything, I'm sorry about this one. But I think you all knew this was coming.


	45. Aftermath

On a grassy hilltop somewhere else in Scotland, a young man is standing over his sleeping brother and his bound friend and fretting over the bone-deep ache of his magic being siphoned away. He tugs at a loose thread in his sleeve and watches it unravel. It takes only a minute to completely loosen the hem at his wrist.

He is halfway through repeating the process on his other sleeve when slithering fingers of cold and wet brush his chest, making him jump. He reaches into his breast pocket to the first vial the woman had given him, the one that was only sealed with her charm--

It’s empty. The water’s soaking his robes. 

And then, several things happen at once. 

His brother blinks his eyes open, still groggy. The formerly bound body comes to its feet looking both furious and scared, and they both know what it must mean for all three of these spells to be broken. Before he can speak or move or cast a spell, a horrible, twisting, wrenching gasp of pain cripples both Death Eaters. Each gasps, clutching his forearm. 

“Severus--”

The man named Severus does not stop, does not hesitate; the fear on his face has won over the fury. He lifts his wand and turns on the spot, disappearing into the morning air.

The astonishment at the easy magic is plain on the remaining man’s face. It lasts only a moment. He crouches, shakes his brother awake, pulling him up by his upper arm. “Sirius, come on, he’s gone back--”

Sirius struggles to his feet, still groggy, fumbling for his wand. “What did you  _ do _ , Regulus? Did you knock me out?”

Regulus is wringing his hands again, ready for an accusation that hasn’t quite come. “Lily--she--I’m sorry! She had a plan.”

“Had?” Sirius asks, uncomprehending.

“She only shared it with me, she knew both of you would--you would not make it through, that you would want to fight. She went alone. She knew what she was doing.” Regulus swallows. “She said she wanted a choice.”

Sirius looks his brother over, and then shakes his head. “That sounds like her all right. Well, come on, then. Let’s see if she’s left any fight for us.”

“She’s dead,” Regulus blurts out. “Both of them are. She put you to sleep, she paralyzed Severus--she gave me a vial she sealed with a charm, look--” He extends the empty vial as if it is some kind of proof. “And the Mark, something went wrong in it. Something I haven’t felt since I took it in the first place."

Sirius looks down at his brother's left arm, and then back up to his face. "And?

Regulus’ adam’s apple bobs. "I think it might be over, Sirius. She said she had a plan, that she’d burn straight through him.”

Sirius curses again, tipping his head back. “That’s not an explanation, Lily,” Sirius says to a passing cloud.

“She said we had to go to the Potter Estate. Find a man named Frank Longbottom who lives--”

“Frank’s  _ alive? _ ”

“She said he was. Said Severus had done it and just--not told. Longbottom has the rest of the plan, he’s ready to move on Hogwarts, Azkaban, the Ministry, the Floo.” Regulus begins pacing again. “But we have to confirm, we have to be sure that it really is--that he’s--”

Sirius can infer the meaning. “Yeah, right. Right.” Sirius pushes his hand through his hair, cursing once more. “Maybe bring proof, even. Could be useful, even--more useful than she might have thought.”

Regulus looks at the ground and can’t bring himself to say anything about his suspicions, about himself, about how much magic he has left. “I--I think if I try to go on my own I’ll splinch myself. You’ll have to side-along me.”

When they appear, the clearing is much as they left it, with the exception of the body. It still gives off vile plumes of vapor that smell of rot and decay.

Tom Riddle’s chest is entirely eradicated, the ribs and last remnants of spine leaving a lighter impression on the ground beneath than the rest of the dissolved flesh; his left hand must have touched whatever contagion did this as well, as it’s nothing more than a shadow burned on grass. The right is splayed wide at the end of a gleaming length of slowly-disintegrating collarbone, and the wand lies in the grass just beyond the fingertips. The hip and leg are ragged, burned through. The handsome face is half burned away, but it is still recognizable as what it once was--and who.

Regulus’ eyes are wide, and after a moment’s hesitation, he nudges the thing with the toe of his boot. It rolls to the side and Regulus twitches, as if he expects words or punishment--but it’s mere gravity.

Regulus wrinkles his nose. “Sirius, can you--whatever she used will have to be rinsed or it’ll ruin it.”

“Why don't you? You've got a wand--”

Away in the brush, something dark in the brush gives a twitch at the sound of their voices. Regulus seizes his brother's arm, and then, in a voice that quavers, calls, “Severus?”

The twitch occurs once again, more pronounced, but there is no reply, just a dark shape sliced to ribbons by the brush. And, just beyond it, a starburst of red hair.

“Is that--” Sirius says, voice gone halting and tight. “We should … we have to take her body. We can’t just leave her--”

“ _ No,” _ Regulus says, seizing his arm before Sirius can step outside his grasp. “Let me speak with him. He won’t listen to you. You know what he’s like, you’ll only make it worse.” Sirius looks ready to argue, but Regulus pleads in a near-whisper, “She cared for him, too. You know she did. She asked for this, she told me--she told me about it. Just let me talk to him. Please.”

Sirius blows air through his nose, but nods. “Fine. I’ll do this bit, then. Shout if you need me. But we have to move fast.”

Regulus makes enough noise on his approach that Severus must know he’s coming, but there’s no reaction, not even a twitch. He can’t be weeping, or if he is, he’s gone strangely still with the grief of it. His dark hair hangs round his face like curtains, like the world is shut out. One pale palm is wound around the smaller one splayed on the ground.

When he’s within a few steps, Regulus can make out an audible whisper, almost melodic. “Severus,” Regulus says once more, wishing his voice weren’t so trembling.

Severus doesn’t move.

“Severus,” Regulus says again, voice less tremulous this time. “What are you--”

“Trying to heal her,” he replies. His voice is empty, flat, devoid of emotion. And then he goes on muttering.

Regulus flexes his hands as if to bring feeling back into them, and watches him work for a moment. 

The dead woman’s cheek is pressed to the earth and her hair is caught in the brush; it must have caught as she fell, and it covers half her face. It could, to one who didn’t know better, appear as if she is still moving, as if all the things she has set in motion have yet to fall. Her cheeks are still flushed and she could just be asleep.

Her wrist is at an odd angle, though, and the dead leaves in front of her parted lips don’t stir with breath.

“Severus,” Regulus tries again. “She can’t be healed. She’s gone.”

That stops the muttering, at least, and there’s a sound of breath being sucked between his teeth. “There’s still a chance--”

“There isn’t. She told me the plan. This was it, this was where it ended. The vial--she broke it and remade it. When she died, the magic would--”

Severus comes to his feet and whirls on Regulus, face gone ugly with rage. “She is  _ not-- _ ”

“Her hand,” Regulus says weakly.

The toe of Severus’ boot has come to press on the ring and pinkie finger of Lily’s outstretched hand. Had she been awake, she would have cried out in pain. Had she been merely unconscious, she might have at least twitched in reflex. 

But none of this has happened, because she is dead; the thing at his feet his no longer the woman he has loved. It is a corpse, and for the first time, Severus appears to realize it. An ocean of denial evaporates in an instant, leaving nothing but salted earth and a barren truth.

Severus sinks back down beside her with a grace borne of the very beginning of grief. Something is happening on his face that makes Regulus close his eyes and turn away. Regulus turns his face to the trees, to the castle beyond, to the morning sun. There is only the sound of the breeze in the branches, and an audible effort for the man kneeling before him to control his breathing.

When Severus masters himself, Regulus turns back to the woman on the ground. Severus has lifted the hair back from her face and is carefully, so carefully, disentangling her locks of hair from the brush and smoothing it back from her forehead as it falls. It’s the kind of gentleness no one would ever give a man like Severus credit for, but here it is, plain to be seen.

“Are you ready to take her?” Regulus asks quietly. “We have to move. We can’t stay here. Every Death Eater will have felt it. Some of them will try to come. They knew he was here, they are likely already searching the grounds.” He swallows. “You may still have the strength to fight, but I don’t think I do.”

(Regulus does not say  _ I do not think I ever will again _ because this realization from the hilltop--the way his wand feels like nothing more than a stick in his fingers--is locked tight away for now in favor of a greater plan. It will be dealt with later, probably with tears, but not now. 

Severus could perceive this if he chose to. He does not choose to.)

“Where,” Severus asks, and then coughs--he sounds as though he’s walked across a desert since he last spoke. “Where are we going?”

“She said you made a plan together. Frank Longbottom at the Potter Estate would be expecting Septimus and Mariposa.” He pauses. “She said you’d know what it meant.”

Severus conjures something like a stretcher beneath the body. Something on Regulus' face registers surprise again, perhaps even jealousy, but Severus can't notice it. The stretcher nudges beneath her, turning her shoulders the way a lover would in sleep, letting her neatened hair cascade over the side in a brilliant waterfall. He takes each of her wrists in his hands and folds one perfect palm over the other blackened one on top of her chest. It is the repose of a carved queen in marble. Then he brushes the last of the earth from her cheek.

When Severus rises to his feet, the stretcher rises with him. As it does, he conjures a sheet that settles gently over her face and body. A shroud.

“Yes,” Severus says finally, as if the words are being pressed from his body by a great weight settling upon his chest. “I know what it means.”

When they emerge from the brush, trailed by the body, there's hope on Sirius' face--hope that his dear friend might still live, that something might be done.

Regulus shakes his head, subtly, and extinguishes that hope.

Severus carries the body. Regulus side-alongs with Sirius and the head of Tom Riddle, placed in a crude cloth sack Sirius conjured. Severus unwraps the wards around the Potter Estate; there is some confusion with Longbottom, but Sirius’ presence forestalls open attack until Severus can offer further explanation, expressed in that flat and affectless tone that, it is clear, arrests their attention and unnerves everyone who hears it.

But there is work to be done, and Severus knows it--can hear her saying it in his memory, if he is not careful--and if his tone disturbs them, let them stop asking questions. The shrouded body is placed on one end of the table, and Sirius and Regulus and the head in a sack at the other. Longbottom rounds the end and peers beneath the shroud, expecting another face, and something very visible happens to his eyes for a few moments before Severus snatches the shroud back over her and takes his own seat.

"Septimus," Longbottom says from beyond the body, putting it together. "And his wife with the dead husband and the dead son.  _ Mariposa _ is a kind of lily-flower. Am I right?"

"Yes," he says.

And then Sirius pulls the head from the sack and the discussion of who they really are is ended.

Frank Longbottom is an Auror, and once the events have been explained adequately, he is willing to adapt. Severus must push words past his jaw, must rummage somewhere past the fog and pull apart the memory of their plan from her presence at his side for the answers people are asking:  _ what did you arrange with her, what did you two plan, what is left to be done, what did she do-- _

What she has  _ done _ is die, and the fact of it is so destabilizing when Severus brushes up against it that he must reorient himself by the oldest methods: digging fingernails into his palm, a thumb pressed to a pressure point in the wrist, a pinch on the inside of his arm when he crosses them. But the plan unfurls, and Longbottom takes charge when it becomes clear Severus will not. Longbottom delegates, begins to move the pieces, begins to set the machinery in motion, neither needs nor relies upon Severus, and whether it is a lack of trust for a Death Eater or understanding is immaterial. The work will be completed all the same.

Severus had diverted a crate of wands to the Potter Estate, as Lily had insisted not two days prior. A prepared message is sent to Nicolas. A small squadron of former Ministry workers led by Longbottom take the Ministry by surprise at noon, taking advantage of the the movement of the lunch hour underscored by the chaos of the death of the Dark Lord to seize the Floo network. The Potter Estate is then connected to the network; a bonfire in Albania is established and joins it. The children hiding at the Potter Estate are sent to be minded by the old man in Albania, and those trained are brought through from Albania and given wands to fight.  The werewolf Lupin is among them and the embrace he shares with Sirius Black makes Severus' hands into cold, unfeeling fists that he expends great effort to unclench. 

Severus has only to heal three of the ten fighters when they return from the Ministry, and they do not ask him questions, not even when he must roll his sleeve past the mangled Mark on his arm in order to keep his cuffs out of the blood. They do not ask about the shrouded body on the table. They take great pains to route other uninjured guests around it and him. They do not ask him to leave its side. All this care betrays a dangerous knowledge, and would concern Severus if there was room for it inside his head. Somewhere, faintly, Severus knows Regulus is shielding him to the best of his ability, and forcing his brother and the werewolf and everyone else to do the same. Perhaps Longbottom, as well. He cannot muster gratitude for it.

Someone places food and water before him, their face indistinct. They say something that is likely intended to be kind but goes unheard. He consumes the offered sustenance with mechanical efficiency.

The war council is moved to the ballroom. Severus stays where he is, watching the wall clock wheel its long hand around once, and then takes the body with him into the relentless sunshine of the day.

No one notices him go. He does not return.

The second attack is executed at nightfall, and does not last longer than the targeted sting on the Ministry. Azkaban is taken in hour, the guards led by Death Eaters whose strength--like Regulus’ own--having been sapped or stolen entirely. The draw of power was uneven; some are left bereft of magical ability entirely, some are untouched. Some have died where they stood, when the draw grew too great. Many survived but, defenseless without magic, were Kissed by the Dementors. The guards who were unMarked surrendered easily once they were overpowered. With the powerful witches and wizards who had been imprisoned now freed--led by Minerva McGonagall--the captured Death Eaters, identified by the Marks still inked on their arms, are fed steadily into the recently-emptied cells of Azkaban.

Hogwarts is retaken by midnight and with ease; when word of the assault spread, many fled to their homes or beyond. McGonagall, the Black brothers, Lupin, Longbottom--and Perenelle Flamel, recently Portkeyed in from Paris--decide to move their headquarters to the castle as a more defensible location.

Severus does not know any of this until much later; Lupin relates it in the weeks to come, in hopes it may interest him. It does not.

The Potter crypt is on the outskirts of the estate, set atop a rolling field near a forest. Inside, there are miles of Potters, stretching back as far as memory, but the latest generation is always at the fore. And there is a new casket for the wife of James Potter--the crypt knew of it the moment she died. The grave reclaims her body as if it is where she has always belonged.

And in the corner, something that once might have been called a man but is now more a shadow. Without any reference point--lost, and with no sense of time, no plan moving him forward, no greater need to occupy his mind--Severus tries to focus on what he knows to be true.

It has been not even a week since Lily returned from Albania, since the Dark Lord demanded to inspect her--his horcrux, though Severus had been too fool to see it--to his satisfaction. Five days since the night she came to his bed and--

No. No, that does not fit at all with the truth he knows.

Four days since the memory charm broke and she hated him. Two since he brought her here, to this cursed and closed estate, and shown what he had done, how he protected them for her, and she attacked him for it, and  _ then-- _

He shakes his head as if to rattle loose a hallucination. Something must have happened to his memory or, worse, his mind. Perhaps she will walk in and laugh at him and tell him to sleep it off. Perhaps he is in Azkaban. Perhaps he is the one who is dead. It is difficult to tell, like this. His throat is dry; he may feel hunger, or exhaustion that claims his consciousness for an instant or an hour, but bodily needs are swallowed up the instant he observes them.

What he knows to be true, then, is this: Potter’s corpse is in the crypt next to hers. It is what she wanted, it was clear in the way she reached for the ghost the ring brought her, in the stag her patronus had become. He could not be so stupid as to miss that. He has missed so much, been so slow, too late, too weak--but no, he could not have missed not that. She had made her choice, and it was this. Anything else is irrelevant.

It is the middle of the night when he is discovered. It is Regulus, though it makes no difference.

“Severus,” Regulus says once more, in the same gentle tone he had in the forest. “It’s time to go. We are moving. The war’s being won.”

Severus tosses his head from where it is pressed to his knees, like a beast of burden troubled by the concerns of a fly. “No,” he says. 

“What do you mean, no?”

His head settles back to his knees. Were Lily Potter alive to see it, she might think he had given all the answers he might, that he is too stubborn, that the machinery of him has run its course on the last of the fuel he had; he is done, has not slept in days or perhaps has been sleepwalking since he found her body; that there is no future but a flat wall, the featureless stone of the tomb.

Lily would see all of this in the curve of his spine, the way his knuckles go white around his knees. But she is dead, her body interred in the stone before them, and so it goes unthought, unsaid, and none of it is understood. Regulus just stands there in tight-jawed silence, waiting.

Severus finally speaks, if only to get him to leave him alone in the dark once more. “She gave you something, before. Intended for me.” It’s barely a question.

Regulus offers it wordlessly, the soft illumination of the vial casting shifting shadows across them both.

A vial, full of memories, labelled in her beautiful flowing script:  _ an antidote. _ Naturally, it was poison that she used to execute her plan, a poison he had brewed. The effects were apparent. His attempts to counteract it failed. And she knew they would, therefore: she has provided her own antidote for him, one that can cure nothing at all. And of course, she’d made sure he had the pensieve. It is all a terribly clever trap, closing around him with its steel teeth; a single thread of light, a hand extended from the past to draw him on, a thing that can be neither resisted nor borne.

Severus' hand closes around the vial. Her damnable worry. Her useless concern. Her final words, will and testament, if he will listen. But she is not here to make him listen, she has left him behind, she has  _ gone. _ She has made her choice and left him with his own, with this distillate of her self intended to alleviate it--as if such a thing were possible.

He wants to smash the vial in blind fury and let the grave-dirt drink the last of her. It already has the rest. 

He doesn't.


	46. Antidote

In years hence, Severus will wonder how exactly he came to Spinner's End. He had merely thought  _ home _ and to home he had gone: not the mansion he had shared with the corpse he has left behind in the crypt, but the childhood home they both had known.

It is intact, unlike much of Cokeworth. Lily’s Fiendfyre took its toll, and the smell of smoke still lingers in the air. But that burned mansion was in the finer part of town. The slums are untouched.

Time moves strangely. He may have just sat down, but the vial is gone, and with effort he can recollect locking it in a drawer and vanishing the key to remove any temptation toward weakness. He sleeps, at some point, or perhaps dozes, or perhaps merely stares at the nicotine-stained walls, willing himself to stop thinking and very nearly succeeding. He wonders vaguely if he has wept, or will weep. He suspects he hasn't, won't. But there is no knowing for sure. There is no knowing anything for sure.

Regulus appears bearing food sometime after the light moves across the closed curtains once. Severus could not say how they tracked him down, and does not care to speculate. Regulus' scowling brother and the werewolf are in tow. The werewolf looks pitying; the younger Black brother looks fretful with heavy dark circles beneath his eyes; the elder looks stiff and tired. They've clearly had some kind of conversation about him and all of them wear the nature of it on their faces: that he is badly damaged in some obvious way, and they all know it. Regulus says  _ hello _ and Sirius is chewing his cheek like he’s angry and Lupin says something that contains the name of that damage, a name he’d rather forget, and Severus attempts to remove Lupin's skin with a particularly nasty spell.

Three on one are bad odds, nearly as bad as four on one, and Severus has not slept or eaten since--he can’t remember, something has happened to his mind, but not  _ since _ \--and it makes him slow and stupid. Lupin tries to be gentle in subduing him, Sirius Black does not, and Regulus looks on aghast, but the result is the same: Severus ends up disarmed and scowling in an armchair.

“We are here to help you,” Lupin says, his voice conciliatory, kind, gentle.

“You are unwanted,” Severus snarls. “And unwelcome.”

“I told you,” the elder Black says, rolling his eyes back to his brother and stuffing Severus' wand in his pocket. “He’s going to be difficult.”

Regulus is wringing his hands again, plucking at a ragged fingernail frantically as it begins to bleed. “Severus, please listen, we understand what you must be feeling--”

“Spare me your sympathy,” Severus says.

“Do you think you’re the only one who cared about Lily?” Sirius shouts, a new kind of pain visible on his face.

_ Lily _ is the crux of the problem going on inside of his mind, but there are facts there, facts he can grasp and use as weapons. “It does not matter. She is dead, and beyond even your caring.”

It fails utterly to have the desired effect, even with his voice flattened by Occlusion. Instead of fury or disgust or denial, they look on him with pity; even Sirius’ features are contorted by it. Lupin appears nearly on the verge of tears.

It does not matter. Severus extends his hand, and puts all the hatred he can muster into his voice, which does not tremble in the slightest. “My wand.”

They look at each other, and there is some communique that Severus cannot perceive--they are pathetic, concerned, useless, useless,  _ useless _ . 

Sirius comes to the fore. “Afraid I can’t. Former Death Eaters who still have their magic aren’t being allowed wands.”

“As if it would do so much,” Severus sneers, even though he feels his heart accelerate. “Children can do wandless magic.”

“This doesn’t have to be difficult,” Lupin says, an edge of annoyance threading through his voice as he stuffs his hands into his pockets. “We don’t have to treat you like a prisoner.”

“But you will if you must, I take it?” Severus comes to his feet again, takes a step forward into the semicircle of his jailers. 

“They want you in Azkaban. They want  _ every _ Death Eater in Azkaban,” Regulus says.

“Then why are  _ you _ free?” Severus drawls, pressing his attack.

Regulus shrinks. “Because I--”

“Because Regulus was part of the war,” Lupin says, sounding tired. “As were you, Severus--perhaps even more than Regulus, due to Lily’s involvement, which is--”

Severus does not care to hear the end of the sentence, and he does not care to hear her name spoken by a beast like Lupin. The wan electric light flickers with the power as he draws it up. He makes a slashing motion with his hand and speaks the spell. Magic obeys: a bright welling of sudden blood, not across Lupins throat as he intended, but rather along the shoulder and chest, catching more on the fabric than flesh. 

Performing magic without a wand is like trying to write cursive wearing a mitten, but it does still function--clumsy, insufficient, but it still functions.

Severus thought the hissing sound of pain Lupin makes would satisfy him. It does not. He reaches for his wand, reaches for  _ accio, _ but Sirius is on him and Severus is weak, underfed, underslept, a very visible wreck, and he might still possess all of his magical abilities but that kind of wandless violence takes much from even a healthy man. It doesn’t take much to muscle him back into the chair once more.

"This is why they want you in Azkaban! You’re not acting like an innocent man! Have you gone absolutely feral?" Sirius pants, exasperated, 

"You have tried to kill me with that beast before," Severus says, jutting his chin toward Lupin.

Sirius searches his memory visibly until it clicks into place. "You're still holding onto that? A grudge from when we were in school? We just fought a war together and  _ won _ and you're holding on to  _ that? _ "

If Lily Potter were alive, she would think the set of Severus' jaw says  _ yes I am.  _ But she is dead, and Severus is holding onto anything that he knows to be true in a sea of falsehood, like a drowning man.

"Snape." Lupin’s wand finishes moving over the scrape--it is not so deep as to not be healed quickly. When he meets Severus’ eyes, he is forcing himself to appear kind. "We  _ won." _

"What exactly did we win, werewolf? The war? The world?"

"The Ministry," Regulus says. “Azkaban, Hogwarts. All of it, your whole plan came off beautifully. We won all of it.”

"I lost," Severus spits, his voice violent with a sorrow. "I lost  _ everything." _

The intimacy of the confession leaves the room echoing and frozen until Sirius finally sits across from Severus, rubbing his fingers through his whiskers. Lupin lays a hand on Sirius’ shoulder.

“Not everything,” Regulus says, spreading his hands. 

The way he looks--so earnest, so believing, as if  _ they _ were any kind of consolation--he has to laugh. The sound is broken, jagged, cruel, but he doesn’t stop it and no one else does either. It spirals into an uncomfortable silence.

“I’ll take first,” says Sirius gruffly, looking up from Severus as if he isn't there. “Remus, you’ve got to manage the werewolves, and Reg, you’re still working on tracking down the Carrows. I’ll do it.”

Regulus looks back and forth, chewing the ragged and bleeding thumbnail, then nods. “In 24 hours,” he says, and then he retreats to the door. "I'll take second. The werewolves are still volatile and may require you for the longest, Remus."

“With Fenrir dead, I doubt it. Send if you need anything,” Lupin says. “And if it is a longer affair, there are others. I’ll come.” The affectionate touch on Sirius' arm could almost go unnoticed if it wasn’t a twisting knife.

When they are gone, Severus pins Sirius with a glare. “First,” he asks. “First  _ what. _ ”

“First watch.” Sirius breaks open the bag. It’s dishes, hot, on china etched with a porcelain  _ P _ and rounded with vines that grew and retreated. “Making sure you don’t do anything stupid, which you seem liable to do. Part of the agreement keeping you out of Azkaban. The other part is that you aren't worth the trouble, not with other Death Eaters taking hostages and trying to flee the country."

One against one is better odds, at least. “What is to stop me from fighting you off and fleeing as well,” Severus says.

“The fact that you’re no more a Death Eater than Regulus is anymore. Maybe less, by the looks of your Mark. That’s how we measure it. You’re a special case.” Sirius heaps a plate with stew thick with potatoes and then pushes it toward Severus. “Remus’ stew is no good cold,” he says. “But if you want to let it, be my guest.”

“Return my wand,” he says. “And leave my home. I do not require a minder.”

Sirius heaps his own plate and tucks in with a spoon better suited to serving. “I don’t think you’re the best judge of that,” he says between mouthfuls. 

“Why. Why  _ you _ and the werewolf, of all people.”

“Certainly not for my own health, Snape,” Sirius says. He means it to sound like a joke but it comes out acid. “If I had my way, Regulus would be here to look after you full time and Remus and I’d be rid of you. But there’s too much Death Eater nonsense to undo--something you could help with if you were so inclined, but you seem more interested in being useless. Frank and the rest need Reg more than you do, and no one but the three of us trust you to--” he searches, visibly, for something less crude than what he’s clearly thinking: to kill himself, to kill everyone else, to flee the country.  “They don’t trust you.”

Sirius eats in silence for a few long minutes while Severus stares stonily at a wall, arms crossed. When the plate is clean and Severus’ is still filled and grown cold, Sirius sighs and reclines in the chair as well.

“Not the slightest bit curious what’s been going on, are you?” Sirius asks. “It’s chaos out there, but they’re really scrubbing the Ministry, end to end. Some real change, for once, Lily would--well. You know how she felt about it.”

Severus stands. “Give me my wand and get out of my home.”

Sirius rises, rolling his eyes and moving to the kitchen to rinse his plate. “They’re talking about Order of Merlin for you, you know,” he says over the running water. “If they don't send you to Azkaban, that is. Depending on if they listen to Regulus. He's in the same spot too but he's still--doing what Regulus does, which is helping his situation, even though he’s a squib now. Lots of Death Eaters are squibs now. Lot of others died when their magic went.” Sirius gives Severus a curious look. “But you've still got your magic, for all the good you use it for. Probably Lily’s doing." 

“Do  _ not, _ ” he spits. It feels like there could be more but the rest is a yawning void, so it remains: a blanket edict.

He ignores it. “Or maybe it was dumb luck. You could stand to act like an innocent man, you know. You could try to help the New Ministry, or catch your old friends. If not for them, then for her. It’s what she wanted.”

Severus comes to his feet, moves to the door. Even without a wand, Severus is confident he could be dangerous, and if Black will not leave--

The handle doesn’t budge beneath his hand.

“House arrest,” Sirius says, drying the plate in his hands. “Which you can thank Regulus for, because as I've said, the other option is Azkaban. You’re stuck.”

He makes the slashing motion once more, speaking the spell, but Sirius is ready; it is blocked easily with a wand. And Sirius--in a moment of insight--vanishes all the sharp knives from the kitchen for good measure, though for whose protection it might be is anyone's guess.

The next day it is Regulus, who chatters nervously about nothing and does not ask for thanks that he well knows Severus will not give. It is the only thing that renders him tolerable. Then Lupin, who is so gentle and patient as to make Severus understand why Sirius may have taken away all the knives. On the fourth day they ask for a list detailing every Death Eater, every crime he can recount from the inner circle--things Regulus would not be privy to, especially. Lupin asks with cajoling, Regulus with his nerves, and Sirius is blunt: if he ever wants to be free again, free of house arrest or Azkaban, he will answer the questions.

It is, on the whole, is better than this pointless, fruitless combat he has been waging against them. So he agrees.

The account takes days to fully assemble, but when a page is complete, it is whisked away. He does not ask where it goes. There are more questions, on parchment, that come in reply--an action that brings up memories he buries with brutal efficiency. He answers the questions and tries to remember nothing more. There is work, and then there is the space around the work. When the work runs out, the days continue to pass and Severus sinks into himself.

He eats, eventually, when food is placed before him. He drinks water from the tap. He reads when he can. He sleeps when he cannot. When he can do neither he presses at his eyes and temples with his fingers and tries to forget.

He finds half a bottle of liquor squirreled away in the back of a cabinet, where even his mother didn’t find it--bad gin, barely better than scouring fluid, but it does the job for a night. 

Obliteration does not last long enough.

He convinces himself, in the hangover, that the previous months have been half-hallucination. That he has gone mad. No one has said her name to him in weeks, so: Lily never existed. Or if she did, she had never cared for him; he had captured her, kidnapped her, their relationship was entirely servile. And if she did care for him, it was a twisted, needy thing, borne of her dependency, vile and manipulative, and he a monster taking advantage. 

It is a better thing to believe than the alternative, so he tries with all his might to believe it.

Narcissa visits once, on a day when Lupin is there. She says something about a moth she had expected to see, suspicions she had possessed. Says Lucius is dead, that he died when his magic was taken, in front of their child, as if that could drum some kind of sympathy out of him. When the ploy fails, she wants to know the fate of the pretty redheaded girl-- “Lily, was it? What a lovely name. I have heard she died defeating your Lord. Did you help her die, I wonder?”

Without a wand and without a sincere desire to hurt her, the only technique left is that of a petulant child. He slams a bedroom door in her face.

Minerva comes on a day that Sirius is there, bearing a bouquet of apologies. She tries to forgive him, which is vile. She tries to tell stories of Lily in the Order to him, which is worse.

He slams a door in her face too.

The only peace is Regulus’ silence and books. The only texts that are here are storage, old editions, schoolbooks. He reads them idly so many times he memorizes them, marks them, making improvements; his wand may be gone but there is still theory. Some of the marks in the margins are labeled  _ SS _ and some are labelled  _ LE _ and the script makes him think of a vial in a drawer with a vanished key but, most times, he chooses to remain ignorant of the hand that wrote them. When he cannot, he accounts it to the madness that has been plaguing him for months, the laughable notion that a woman like Lily Potter could have ever been  _ his. _

In the darkest moments, lying in bed at night, there is a blind and paralyzing fury; that she may have cared for him truly and  _ still _ left him to this suffering that she, more than anyone, has been so intimate with. The rage of it chokes him.

Weeks pass like this. Minerva makes a second attempt and does not say the name once. He rebuffs her every salvo with stony silence, his most frequent companion. She does not come again.

It is two months on, very late into the evening--though Severus stopped keeping track of time weeks ago--when a woman Regulus named  _ Perenelle _ arrives. She sends Regulus ahead to the Ministry--he promises to return the following morning as he leaves, but no one else steps to take his place, leaving them alone.

Perenelle Flamel offers back his wand.

“You are exonerated, Mister Snape,” she says. “Congratulations, and my apologies on the delay. Rebuilding a government is time-consuming and you seemed safe enough here. There is a ceremony for the Order of Merlin you are to receive, if you would like it, but I was given to understand you were not a terribly social man.”

He takes his wand and doesn’t thank her. He isn’t even sure why he’s missed it. There is nothing he wants to do with it, no magic, no spells. No work left to be done. 

Perhaps now they will leave him in peace.

She goes on, unperturbed at his silence. “We have pieced together the events of that day, you know,” she adds. “Your girl was very clever. It would have been easier to square with your help, but your friends--”

“They are not.” His voice is thick with disuse.

“Your co-conspirators, then, informed us you were not terribly cooperative. It would seem they did not overstate the matter.” She measures him, lifting a brow. "A place has been prepared for you in the New Ministry all the same." 

He sneers, "I am not suited to government work."

"You were suited well enough to it under the Dark Lord, if your notes are to be believed," she says sharply. "Regardless, the bulk of talented wizards capable of handling Dark artifacts and curses now find themselves imprisoned, squibs, or deceased. You are valuable to the New Ministry. Your talents may save lives."

"I have no interest in such work."

"Indeed. What do you have an interest in, then, Mister Snape? Your friends seemed certain this sort of thing would be best for you, to provide purpose to see you through your grief."

"They are  _ not, _ " he says, "my friends."

She measures him once more, as if trying to translate his face into something she can understand. “You wish to leave the country, yes? Many of your colleagues under Voldemort have tried. Tell me, where will you go?”

Severus looks to the door. He had thought of it and all it represented when his thoughts became too loud, but a destination has never even entered the equation. He had thought of the door as an abyss he could fall into and disappear, not a passage with anything at the end of it. 

“Perhaps you have nowhere to go,” Perenelle says idly as she moves to the door and opens it. “I will leave you to your sorrows, then, and the rest of your lonely life.”

The way the sunlight of dusk slants on the street outside, it is a beautiful late spring day--unseasonably warm and, even here, blooming green. And seeing it, she pauses, glances back.

"If I may, Mister Snape. Lily Evans--”

“Her name,” he enunciates carefully, “was Potter.”

“Very well.” Perenelle takes a breath, draws herself up. “Lily Potter may have died alone, but she did not die scared, and she did not die for nothing. And if what her friends say is true, she cared for you--very deeply. She would not like this thing you have become, I think. No true friend would." She steps over the threshold. “I think she may yet surprise you. I think you may yet surprise yourself, in fact, if you only let her.”

“Shut the door on your way out,” he snarls.

“Must I make it plain to you? Your friends have not told the New Ministry of the vial of memories,” she says, voice sharp, that of a teacher. “It could be called treason--they could contain vial information--but they have told no one. I had to pluck it from Regulus’ mind myself. They believe it to be too personal to share.” 

“Wasted effort,” he says through gritted teeth. “I have not looked into the vial since I was imprisoned here.”

She makes a sharp, angry motion. “They have protected you in her memory, for the love she bore you and for the love you still bear. You are not so good an Occlumens to hide that--it is in everything you have done, every action you have described by omission in your notes, every element of tactical movement corroborated by others. It is the reason you have been exonerated--your efforts in her defense are all that stand between yourself and a cell in Azkaban. And yet you refuse to hear the last words she has left for you? You believe you do not owe her that in exchange for your freedom?” Her eyes go flinty. “She thought you brave. Your friends call this grief. I call it cowardice.”

He raises his wand, the blind fury overtaking him, but she vanishes from the top step. All the violent motion serves only to slam the door shut behind her so violently it shudders the walls and must echo up the street.

There is too much violence still left to expend. He is a spring, wound tight--he has the solitude he has wanted for months now but it is not enough. There is still no silence, no peace.

The bureau he locked the vial in smashes to pieces and there--still shining, still silver, still lettered  _ an antidote _ in her hand. He moves to the sink, teeth gritted, fumbling with the cork, ready to dispose of it, to drain it all away and then, perhaps, he may have some peace--

He notices that the hand holding the vial, ready to tip its contents down the drain, is trembling as if there was anything left to fear between heaven and the bottom of the river that runs through this cursed town.

No, this is not about his fear or his bravery. This is about what he owes.

If she never existed, there is nothing to fear. If she was a prisoner, then this is an accusation--deserved. And if there was, perhaps, more between them, if the memories he tries to hide even from himself of her smile, her mouth, her hand reaching for his body--

If those are true, there is a debt to be repaid.

The pensieve is here; she made sure of it. It may be set upon the rickety table in the kitchen; the memories flow into it instead of down the drain. There is only one path out, and it runs through. 

He touches the surface.

\--Lily is laying in the grass by the river and his voice telling her everything, spinning a castle out of thin air. He told her everything: that she wasn't alone or a freak but that he was like her, and there were others, so many others they filled up a school, a world--and they would be taught, would be powerful, would  _ do magic. _ The feeling of the cool earth beneath her fingertips while he talked and how her heart filled to bursting with the knowledge.

How later, sprawled under the same tree, going through the next term's books--and the next--and the next--how that joy never seemed to slacken but how her heart seemed to expand to contain it. How many late nights she had written his name out on a duplicated parchment and how good it felt to see his script reply. How beautiful the things he made were; the potion that gave off an entire flock of doves drawn in smoke, or the one that caught starlight in a vial, or even the inky velvet darkness he could pull around his wand and fist--the prelude, he promised with a brilliance in his eyes and a smile on his face, to real invisibility.

She had never got to see the result, of course. There is no version of their history that does not contain the day of their OWLs, down by the lake. There is only one drop of it she let through; how, when she portrait-hole had shut behind her, sealing him away from her, how she had pressed her back to it. How she had run up the stairs and shut the curtains and cried herself to sleep. How awful losing him had been.

There is a moment of darkened silence in the path of her life for the intervening years. For Potter. For a life and a love she would spare him, for all that he has lived in the wreckage of it. It’s not for or against him, and it never has been--it is separate from him entirely. But it ends in the same place their life together begins, on Halloween, in Godric’s Hollow. 

Severus knows what is coming, wants to draw her back into the warmth of her home where--he knows, surrounded by the last of her--she is so loved, but she had answered the door. She had known it must be a friend, only the friends could knock--and then found  _ him _ there, looking half-wild and pale as death.

"Severus?" she said, half quavering with fear, half with hope that he was a friend truly again, the private hope that the Death Eater spy they had was  _ him _ \--

But he didn't answer. Merely panted there, one hand on the doorframe and staring into her face. Then, a violent motion of his wand.

Lily had come to in an unfamiliar room, in an unfamiliar place, with a dark-robed man who was both familiar and not. When he explained what had happened, she had struck him, screamed, and nothing had changed. The world was a dark sky hung from pushpins of bright pain. A fist through a window, a palm through a mirror, a wrist broken and mended too late, down and down and down--

Then, the charm. Then, three years of something like peace, her slow recovery. It is like watching a portrait painted of himself by a stranger, like listening to his own voice over the telephone, relating the long and drifting days with his careful distance between them.

Then Sirius brought her a foothold in the war.

And in pressing him to believe in her war, she had found him more worthy-- _ more _ than he had been. It brought them closer, pushed them together, even as they fought. It had made her see the shape of the world. There has been good there, beauty even buried in all this darkness. His fingertips playing at the end of her braid. The constructed version of him, and how it gave a glimpse of the man he might have been, the kind of man she hopes he might be able to become still. And more: her fingernails scoring his back, his mouth pressed to her throat. Even that horrible morning in his bed after the charm broke, how she saw his face illuminated by dawn and wanted to touch it with tenderness, even then. That fierce and burning thing that flashes at her only when he is too riled to shade or shield it. 

Love. Love. A thousand times, a poisoned and doomed love, returned. And this, the supposed antidote.

And the last moment, after the litany, clearest of all. They sit in the study, across the table from one another. “I need a break,” she lies, rising. 

She prepares the other three vials in silence, puts them into her pockets, showing him her hand, showing the nature of the trick, and then moves to the bathroom--to the mirror, where her eyes focus above her shoulder, behind herself. 

And then her eyes focus exactly on Severus’ own.

“Hi,” she says softly.

Her name comes to his lips unbidden but dies there, too. She can’t hear, can’t respond. Severus is absolutely anchored by the fact of it, even when he uses the knowledge to bury itself. If the rest of him were burned away he would still know it in his bones.

She knows it too. “I hope you’re here,” she begins. “I hope it worked. I hope you know how much--” She looks up, blinks. The wan light of the bulb above the mirror catches something liquid in her green eyes, but it disappears before it falls. “This is so hard.”

Another man, a man who is not Severus Snape, who has not lived this life and taken these lessons from it, might have still tried to reach to comfort the image of the woman before him--this memory, this gift. 

He does not. He knows better. It is the only good thing left inside him, this fact that he knows better.

She takes a deep breath, puts both hands on the curved porcelain of the sink. “No one knows how much this hurts more than me. No one. I’ve suffered it.” Her eyes flick up to the mirror again, meeting his. “I know what I’m doing to you, and I’m sorry. It has to be this way.”

Another kind of man might respond. Might say  _ it didn’t _ . Might try to speak to her only to lie. 

He does not.

“But I know you. I know how you are. You’ll get everything all twisted up, so I had to leave you proof. Proof that I was here. That I loved you.” 

She says it so easily, as if it’s understood, the most natural thing in the world. It is a fist in Severus’ throat.

“I know you don’t think you deserve it, but it’s got nothing to do with what anyone deserves. It just is. I want--” she pushes a hand through her hair. “I know you won’t see it as freedom, but you can’t shut yourself away forever. You can forget me if you have to--you won’t, but you could if you wanted--but you can’t just shut yourself up away until you die. If I succeed, if you survive this, I want you to do more than go on surviving.”

Then she turns and faces him directly, still leaning against the sink. He can almost feel the warmth of her body, the breath in her lungs. It’s almost as if she’s real, and here--still alive, still able to be touched.

Her green eyes are fixed on him, alive, full of something powerful, something he can only barely comprehend. “Severus, you have to live after I’m gone. I want you to live.”

And then she vanishes, and he is alone once more, in the dingy kitchen of his childhood home. It has taken some time, this accounting of her life. It is the middle of the night, and there is rain against the window where there was none before. He doesn’t know how long he sits there, turning the vial over in his hands. He has lost all track of time these weeks, and has no sense of it until the faint light of dawn begins to brush its fingers down the shut curtains. 

Severus rises, moves to the window, and lifts the heavy fabric to watch.

The sun may be pulling itself over the horizon, but here, in Cokeworth, there is a soft spring rain still falling. Droplets cling to the window, collecting in streams, in rivulets, in rivers cascading to the earth.

Lily always loved strange weather. 

It is the first thought he has had of her that he has not tried to swallow up with magic or shut away from himself. Lily would sprint through it when the sun slanted through raindrops, when it thundered when it was snowing, when the sky went odd colors at dawn and dusk. She had loved all of it.

And the skinny, strange boy from across the river. Yes, and him.

Severus moves to the front door and opens it, extending one hand out into the rain. The sun is faraway and pale, but it still feels warm on his face. He realizes he hasn't left the house since he returned to it, hasn't felt the rain on his skin in--he doesn't know how long.

Rain with dawn sunshine running through it has no magical properties, is included in no potion, is no kind of antidote to any of the poisons he has known, and yet--

And yet, he steps out into it anyway, into the water and light.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have to thank my betas, ap_trash_compactor and x_medea, for their tireless efforts in knocking this thing into shape. I am honored to have them both be so excited and so relentless on this work, and it would not exist without them.
> 
> When I started this in 2011, I thought this was Severus’ love story. As the story grew when I picked it back up in 2017, I realized it isn’t his at all. It’s Lily’s. I don’t intend to write a sequel, or go any further with this story for that reason: it can’t continue without her.
> 
> By necessity, this leaves Severus to live the rest of his life with his choices--without a war to fight, without a child to loathe and help by turn, without a convenient and poetic death to exit on. But there is hope in that freedom, and the rest of his life is exactly that: his own. Which I think is exactly what Lily would have wanted.
> 
> Thank you for coming with me for this story. There is no greater validation to a writer than to know that someone is reading your work and that it is making them feel something. I hope it has brought you as much enjoyment as it has brought me. I read every single comment, and I have other projects in the works, and my askbox is always open.


End file.
